


If It Was the End of the World

by Anarfea



Series: Anything You Need Universe [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Bullying, Double Penetration, Dream Sex, Flogging, Homophobic Language, Humiliation, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Multi, PTSD Sherlock, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Threesome - F/M/M, Watersports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:56:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1567067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anarfea/pseuds/Anarfea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set between Chapters 11 and 12 of Anything You Need, expanding on the small hook:</p><blockquote>
  <p>That horror had been surpassed only by the phantasm that had come over him during his fit of loneliness and ennui in Kiev, which had shaken him so badly he’d thrown aside all logic and self-preservation and sought out Irene Adler.</p>
</blockquote>This is that story.
            </blockquote>





	1. I’m Not Dead

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been a long time in the making, the time stamps on the google docs indicated my incredibly patient betas started working with me on this in November of 2013! I'm ignoring S3 canon for this, since I started writing during the hiatus. It is still a WIP but there are multiple completed chapters stored up and I hope to update every week or so.

When Sherlock was young, he and Mycroft had played simultaneous bughouse chess when his brother was in a mood to indulge him, much to their father’s chagrin, as he considered the unorthodox variation a distraction to their development as competitive players.  Attacking Moriarty’s network reminded him of those games—except he and his brother were playing in tandem instead of in opposition.  Mycroft sent Sherlock pieces in the form of assets, data, money and favors; Sherlock dropped them across the globe and traded them for on-the-ground intelligence sent back to Mycroft’s analysts, and, occasionally, for people, whom Mycroft held and questioned or re-programmed before placing them on his own board.

The difference, of course, was that traditional bughouse strategy was based on attacking the king, and their opponents had none—just an endless supply of pawns that were promoted to queens and quickly traded.  Neither did they have a time clock; Sherlock found himself able to cope well enough during the highlights—the reunion with Zhi Zhou in Shanghai had been particularly satisfying—but the innumerable hours spent in aeroplane seats and railway cars weighed on him.  And yet he’d grown dependent on international travel; he discovered that constantly disrupting his circadian rhythm was one of the few things that kept the nightmares at bay.  He escaped them only if he ran his body down completely before resting, like letting a battery die completely before a recharge.  He kept himself sustained with caffeine and nicotine and, occasionally, other stimulants Mycroft wouldn’t have approved of Sherlock purchasing with his money, in hopes that when he did finally tumble into one of the fungible hotel beds, as he allowed himself to do tonight, he would be exhausted enough that his sleep would be dreamless.  

 

* * *

 

The blades of his scapulae cut into his torn trapezius muscles as Jim’s every thrust pushed him back into the chair, the leather buttons leaving indentations on his back and shoulders.  Jim’s fingertips left bruises on Molly’s hips where he gripped her, ground her against Sherlock.  Jim angled his strokes upward; each thrust pushing him into Molly, slick and tight around him.  His body couldn’t take the combination of ecstasy and agony, of fucking and being fucked.

Jim put his hand against Molly’s bound arms and pushed her forwards; her soft nipples and rough binds rubbed against his chest.  He felt the rim of Jim’s glans pop over his sphincters when he pulled out, and he grinned at Sherlock, eyes fever bright, daring him to protest as he lined up his cock against Molly.  Her eyes locked onto his, and her pupils disappeared as fear and comprehension flooded her features.  Molly gave a low wail of pain, and he _felt_  Jim force himself inside her.  He hadn’t thought it was possible for Jim to violate his body further, but this was a new level of horrific intimacy.  Jim rutted his cock against Sherlock’s own _through_  Molly, who sobbed into his shoulder; her tears stung the cuts Jim had made across his jaw and clavicle.

He heard himself begging, his voice high and frantic, as Jim snapped his body into her again and again, making her cry out rhythmically into his ear, and then Jim gave him what he’d begged for, hard enough that he screamed, felt blood flowing from the pulsing vessels inside him, and he begged again, for mercy.  Jim fucked them both, taking turns, switching whenever Sherlock pleaded for it, until he was reduced to a steady stream of supplication—“please, please, please,” with Jim alternating every thrust.

When he was certain he couldn’t bear it anymore, Jim stopped, rocked slowly inside him, and drew the folding knife from his pocket, snapping it wickedly with a flick of his wrist.  He pulled Molly back by the hair, placing the blade at her throat as he began to take Sherlock again, building in speed and intensity, slamming into his prostate, until he felt his thigh muscles tensing against the chair.  He felt Jim tensing, too, and then his cock was spasming inside him; he felt his own pulsing into Molly, and Jim drew the blade across her carotid as they came together, showering all three of them with blood.

 

* * *

 

 

He awoke with a stabbing pain in his jaw from grinding his teeth, half moon indents in his palms, tangled in damp, shame covered sheets.  He peeled them away from his sweaty, sticky body in disgust and threw them onto the floor, sitting up.  He slung his feet over the side of the bed onto the industrial, low pile carpet, and slumped forward, putting his head between his knees until his blood redirected to where it was supposed to be and his breathing was under control.  Unsteadily, he rose to his feet, holding the nightstand for balance, and stumbled towards the loo.

He switched on the harsh lighting and stared into the mirror.  The face on the other side of the glass was not his own; it belonged to the man whose name was on his current passport:  Einar Jᴓrgensen.  Swedish national.  Resided in Stockholm.  Had earlobe length, white blond hair, which he brushed out of his bloodshot eyes.  He forced a toothbrush between his teeth and scrubbed at them, renewing the searing pain in his jaw, and spat pink.

He detached the hand-held shower head and stood in the stall, turning on the taps.  The hot water in this dive worked only intermittently, and he’d caught it on an off morning.  No matter, it quickly caused the last of his engorged vessels to contract again.  He didn’t usually dream when he sucummed to his transport, but when he did, he dreamed of Jim and Molly, and he inevitably awoke erect and contrite. He rinsed the mess from his stomach, and scrubbed at his body with soap.

Afterwards, he towelled his gooseflesh covered skin vigorously and walked back into his room.  Light was starting to creep under the blackout curtains, and he drew them back, revealing the dismal, poured concrete tenements in one of the more unpleasant neighborhoods in Kiev.  His work in Ukraine was done.  There was nothing to do but wait, to see whether Vlasenko or Romanyuk would emerge victorious in this latest struggle; he and Mycroft has succeeded in getting the two of them to turn on each other, and either outcome would cross another name off Moran’s list.

He dressed in the gray light of the early October morning, strapping his survival knife to his ankle, beneath his jeans and above his hiking boots.  He pulled a long sleeved t-shirt over his head and tucked it in, sliding the Glock 17 into his waistband at the small of his back before zipping his wool cardigan over it.  The Glock’s internal hammer meant he didn’t have to worry about it catching on his clothing, and it could be safely stowed with a round chambered—a fact that had proved the difference between life and death in São Paulo.

He was not in the mood for the restaurant across the street’s idea of breakfast, which consisted of watery porridge and second hand cigarette smoke.  In fact, he wasn’t in the mood for former Soviet states at all, though he probably should stay in the general geographical area until he heard from Mycroft.  He reached for his mobile, one of the many burners he’d had over the past twenty months, which he’d left charging on the table in front of the window.  For reasons he couldn’t explain, he found himself tapping in a number he’d memorized years ago and sworn he’d never use:

 

> I’m not dead.  Let’s have dinner.

He didn’t sign it.

Even so, his phone pinged almost immediately, and he nearly dropped it in surprise when he read the words:

 

> Apaczai Csere Janos utca 12-14 V

Even without diacritical marks, the direction was clear.  There was one train that ran daily from Kiev to Budapest.  He put on the black leather motorcycle jacket he’d picked up in St Petersburg, shouldered his bag, and left the hotel for the railway station.

 

He spent most of the day, and the following night, lying on his back in the top bunk of a four bed sleeping compartment, palms pressed together beneath his chin, too wired to close his eyes.  Thoughts flew back and forth between his synapses, as though the train itself were bouncing the conflicting thoughts around his skull with its slow, harmonic motion.  He hadn’t seen Irene since he’d rescued her in Karachi.  When he’d told her to run, she’d fled to Peshawar, where he’d met her a day later.  She’d invited him to run away with her; he’d declined, and she’d handed him a burner phone with a number programmed in it with a rueful look.  He later learned she had absconded with a businessman from Dubai.  He hadn’t seen her since.

Twenty-five hours later, he arrived at Budapest’s Keleti Railway Station.  He bought Hungarian Forint and hired a cab to take him to the address Irene had sent him, which a quick google search had told him was five star hotel in the heart of the city, on the Pest side of the Danube, between the Elizabeth and Chain Bridges.

He checked in, half expecting to see Irene at the bar, which was unreasonable, considering it was barely noon.  He thought about inquiring after her with the concierge but decided against it.  She would seek him out in time.

Instead, he went to his room, deposited his single bag on a chair, and took a shower—a hot one, this time—trying to clear his head.  With each passing moment he became increasingly convinced that coming here had been a terrible idea, and yet it felt equally foolish to return to Kiev.

 

He killed time in the afternoon reacquainting himself with the city, setting out into Budapest’s fifth district in search of something to eat more palatable than the train station sandwich and something to wear more presentable than his motorcycle jacket and faded jeans.  Although he’d spent a fair amount of time in Central Europe, he hadn’t been to Hungary since he was a child.  Ironically enough, the InterContinental hotel was in more or less familiar territory, easy walking distance from the British Embassy, which was perhaps closer than he would have wished to Mycroft’s eyes and ears.  It was, however, fortuitously close to another institution of which he had fonder childhood memories—Gerbaud Confectionary, where Mycroft had dragged him off to buy boxes of macaroons they’d eaten together in Vörösmarty Square.

 

He met Irene later that evening, at an out of the way restaurant in Buda who's address she'd left with the concierge.  He found her tucked away in an intimate corner table next to the fireplace in the wine cellar, rather than in the proper dining room.  Her appearance was altered, but Sherlock would have recognized her in a heartbeat.  She had cropped her hair shorter, which emphasized the curl, and lightened it to honey brown.  She still wore the signature red lipstick he’d remembered from their first meeting, and again, when she’d sent him her camera phone, wrapped in red foil and black cord.  He’d received another gift, that night, which he’d never opened, but he tried hard not to think about that.

“Hello, Mr Jᴓrgensen,” she said.

“Hello, Ms Reinhart.”  

“Sit,” she said, motioning to the chair across from her.  

He did.

“Have dinner with me.”

“I’m not hungry.”

She smiled.  “I’d hoped you might say that.”

Sherlock’s stomach was coiled too tightly to accept much food, but he managed to ingest crisp bread with sliced camembert, and a glass of Királyleányka.  White wines had never been his wont, especially this late in the year, but Irene had ordered before he arrived, and he had been pleasantly surprised; it was bright and aromatic, though not quite so dry as a refined Grüner Veltliner.

“So,” she asked, “is it the end of the world?”

_If this was the very last night, would you have dinner with me?_

“Hardly.”  And yet, as ever, Irene wasn’t far from the mark.  His fall certainly marked the end of _a_  world.  His life in London, with John, his career as a consulting detective, his friendship with Molly.

 

Afterwards, they took a walk down the hill towards the Danube.  A cool breeze blew up from the river, bringing fog with it.  Irene wore a camel coat with three-quarter length sleeves and black leather gauntlet gloves, and she strode with her arm linked through his.  He shortened his stride to match hers, watching the wisps of cloud circling their ankles, marveling at Irene’s ability to maintain perfect balance in stiletto heels on cobblestone streets.  

The glow of sodium lamps reflected of the rippling surface of the river, making the water gleam like amber.  They walked over the bridge, between the pair of guarding lions, the wind lifting their hair.  Sherlock couldn’t help but compare them to the Lions of Trafalgar Square.  Budapest was alight at night, but without the pulse or tension of London.  Irene paused halfway across, staring at a cruise ship below.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I stand on bridges, and I just think—”

“Of jumping,” he whispered.

She nodded.

_Falling is just like flying.  Only there’s a more permanent destination._

He let his arm drift to the small of her back, gently steering her towards Pest.  

 

Back at the InterContinental, they stood side by side in the lift, and he ignored his own floor, continuing to ride with her; both of them knew he would be accompanying Irene to her suite without either of them mentioning it.  She shed her coat as they walked in the door, hanging it in the cupboard in the entryway, and took off her shoes, dropping four inches in height.  He couldn’t help but recall when she’d removed her heels in her house in Belgravia, after she’d wrapped herself in his coat.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t been able to make deductions about Irene.  He had known, for instance, that she wore Chopard perfume, that she conditioner washed her hair, and that the Christian Louboutin heels she wore were a gift from a client with a fetish for them.  But he’d also known that what he was looking at was not a person but a _persona_ , that none of the details he could glean from Irene’s appearance told him anything about her—until she’d made her revealing comment about disguises being self-portraits.

 _I think you’re damaged, delusional, and believe in a higher power.  In your case, it’s yourself.  Oh, and_  somebody _loves you._

How the times had changed, he thought bitterly; only the first was now true.  He wondered whether or not she could see it.  He would have to play his cards very close to the vest for this one.  He followed her example and removed and hung up his coat, a hip length double breasted wool thing he’d found on váci utca.  It was nothing to the Belstaff.  Irene peeled off her gloves and set them down on the table in the hall.

She sighed.  “I’m very intuitive about sensing what men want, but even I need _something_ to go on.  Why are you here?”

Why indeed.  He’d thought of little else during twenty-five hour train ride, and was unsatisfied with his own rationale.  He’d needed to see someone who remembered him, remembered how he’d been before his life had become an unceasing cycle of misery and ennui; he changed time zones and and languages and currencies, but in every city the pattern was essentially the same.  There had been a time when catching criminals had been exhilarating; when he’d been scrambling over rooftops and digging through skips with John, his blood had sung with adrenaline in his veins.

Now, his work had become tedious.  He traveled, by bus or train where possible, paying for everything in cash, which Mycroft left for him at drop points.  He did reconnaissance, gathering intelligence on men, and occasionally on women, whose dossiers Mycroft sent him.  He manipulated the situation on the ground, whether it was tipping off the local police or planting evidence to turn gangs against each other.  

Even killing had become banal.  The first time, after the shoot out in São Paulo, Mycroft had sent a cleaner to help him dispose of the body.  He’d known it was either him or the man he’d killed, and he’d seen dozens of corpses of people killed by gunshot wounds, but even so, it had unnerved him.  Once he’d seen how it was done, however, Sherlock had told Mycroft not to bother on subsequent occasions.  He killed only when necessary, but with neither hesitation nor remorse, and he took care of his mess after, arranging the deaths to look like drug related murders, or suicides, as the circumstances warranted.  What a consulting criminal he might have been.

But he wasn’t willing to confide any of these things in Irene, and wasn’t sure she’d believe him if he did.  Instead, he asked, “why do people usually join you in hotel rooms?”

Her eyes narrowed.  He expected a sharp retort, but she didn’t rise to the bait.  “You’re not ‘people,’ Sherlock.  You’re especially not the kind of people who traverse international borders for a booty call.”

He shrugged.  “Perhaps I’m interested in ‘recreational scolding’ and am prepared to pay for it.”

“You’re not.  Interested in being dominated, I mean.  I can smell a submissive, and you aren’t one.  Also, you’re not prepared to pay me, and I don’t need your money.  Or should I say, Mycroft’s money.”

A smile quirked across his lips.

She opened the minibar and cracked the seal on a bottle of scotch, pouring out two glasses.  She seated herself in one of the chairs next to the window, legs crossed, and took a sip.  “Is _that_ why you’re here?  Did Big Brother send you?  If you want to know if I’m still in contact with any of Moriarty’s people, you could have just asked.  I have names.  Of people here in Budapest.  Or Kiev.”

 _How_ she had determined he’d come from Kiev was something he would have to get out of her, later.  “No.  Although, I’ll take anything you’re willing to give me.”  

She set her glass down.  “That’s the first true thing you’ve said all evening.”

He blinked.   _Always a self-portrait_.  Was it?   _Did_ he want whatever Irene would give him?  And what might she be willing to give?  He took a deep breath, and not all of the shudder when he let it out was feigned.  “I need to be punished.”

“What for?”

“I behaved less than admirably towards a woman I should have known to admire.  I was graceless in the presence of the most gracious woman I’ve ever met.  I said things which were unpardonable, in front of my brother, no less.  I hurt someone, someone who loved me.  Whose love I didn’t deserve.”

She stood up, crossing the carpeted floor in her stockinged feet.  They were black, sheer, and he could see through them enough to note her toes were varnished in the same, sanguine shade as her fingernails.  “Is that all?”

“No.  Is it enough to punish me?”

She looked at him, searchingly, and touched his face, tracing the line of his chin with the ball of her thumb.

He took her wrist into his hand, caressing the soft flesh on the inside, as he’d done when he took her pulse.

She twisted her arm in his grasp and pulled her hand through his, clutching his index and middle finger and pressing back and down.

_That’s quite enough of that, Jim hissed, seizing Sherlock’s hand, bending the fingers back, sending bright tendrils of pain down his forearm._

His knowledge of self defense deserted him, and he felt himself reflexively move his body downward to take pressure off his hand.

Irene kept exerting force, bringing him to his knees, pressing his hand to the floor.  “Is this what you want?”  She flexed her wrist again, and he hissed in pain, curling the fingers of his other hand into a claw.  She stared into his face, eyes fierce and bright and dilated.  “You want me to make you submit?”

“Yes, Miss Adler,” he breathed.


	2. Let’s Have Dinner

Irene clenched her fingers around Sherlock’s, bending his back, and shifted her weight forward to bring him down, watched him squirm on his knees.  She squeezed once, until his full lips parted and he moaned.  Point made, she dropped his hand.  “No.”  She wasn’t sure what Sherlock wanted, but she had no intention of letting him play on her sentiments again.

He clenched and unclenched his fingers; they were as long as slender as she remembered, but had felt calloused in hers, had lost some of their delicacy.  “No?”

“I said, ‘no,’”  She turned her back on him, crossed the room, and pulled open the drapes, revealing the lights of the Chain Bridge they’d just walked over, the turquoise dome of the castle on the other side.  Sherlock was with her in a hotel room.  She still had difficulty believing it, even though she had been getting used to the idea for more than a day, since the burner phone she’d kept charged since Peshawar had inexplicably buzzed.

 

She’d been half asleep, alone in her flat, well, what she’d come to think of as her flat, in Zugló, when the vibration had jangled.  It was small but adequate, newly built, somewhat lacking in character, owned, in fact, by a National Assemblyman, who liked, among other things, providing his occasional Dominant with a place to live rent free.  It had been one of the things making her linger in this city, although she knew it was getting to be time, again, to move on.  She’d heard the whispers about Moriarty’s network turning on itself, and while there was no obvious payer for the bounty which had once been on her head, she knew there were players who would like to exact vengeance against her for one deed or another.  The phone shook her out of her torpor, because there was only one person to whom she’d given that number.

A flow of warmth spread out from the center of her chest, down into her limbs and extremities, pushing back the shadows creeping around the edges of her thoughts, banishing them to their accustomed corners.  She reached out and snatched the phone from its place in her bedside table drawer, underneath her Hungarian mobile.  She pulled it to her and ducked her head under the covers; the light of the cheap green screen reflected off the sheets.

—I’m not dead.  Let’s have dinner.

She had laughed—not her throaty, seductive laugh, or her low, menacing laugh, but a free, exuberant sound that hadn’t left her lips since she was a girl—and she felt her thumbs flying over the keys before she’d formed a conscious thought.

—Apaczai Csere Janos utca 12-14 V

She’d regretted it instantly.  She should have played it cooler, coyer, made her delight less obvious, and kept him well enough away from a place she associated with work, because Sherlock was not a client.  But, the damage had been done, and she’d phoned András and booked a suite for the coming week.

 

The fretting had started soon after.  She had wondered, why _now_ , after years of silence, and then Sherlock had ducked through the doorway of the wine cellar, slumping to fit through, bleach-blond hair falling into sleep-deprived eyes, and she’d known.  Irene had spent enough time in front of the mirror, dabbing concealer on her dark circles, to recognize boredom and desperation and _loneliness_  when she saw it.  Kate used to do her make-up.  She thought of that every time she put her face on.

She saw her own face now, reflected in the glass, superimposed over the Buda skyline.  She composed her features, knowing Sherlock would be watching for any sign of weakness, and took deep breaths, willed her pulse to slow.  “You want to be punished?” she said, turning to face him.  “That can be arranged.  I think you deserve to be punished.  But we will do this on _my_ terms.”  

“Name them.”  

A jolt of adrenaline warmed the blood in her veins.  She turned slowly, watching his face.  “We agree on what your infractions have been, and on what retribution is warranted for each.”

His expression was calculated, bland, showed little.  “Very well.  What are my sins?”

“Sins?”  She arched an eyebrow.  “I wouldn’t have taken you for the Catholic fetish type.  Still playing the bleeding vicar, I see?”

“Always a self-portrait.”

“Indeed.  Well, if you want to define it in terms of ‘sin,’ then, Pride.”

“Obviously.”

“You just had to show off how clever you were.  Couldn’t stand to be shown up in front of Big Brother.”  

“And my punishment?”

She cocked her head to the side.  “I did say I wanted to try to cut myself slapping that face.”

A shadow passed over his features, but he nodded.  “Alright.”

Interesting.  He had clearly requested John punch him with a closed fist before their first meeting, she would have thought he would respond more favourably to being slapped around a bit, but it clearly was not a turn-on.  Irene generally believed that soft limits were for pushing, but she would have to play that one by ear.

“More significantly,” she continued.  “You stole from me.  And I’m not talking about my cameraphone.”  The life she’d carved out for herself, her home in Belgravia, a line of work she enjoyed, a woman she’d shared both with.  Her ability to sip coffee in a café or walk in a park without looking over her shoulder.

He thrust his chin forward, challenging.

“I think you came here looking for a beating.”

“And if I did?”

She walked across the room, spine straight, shoulders back; she’d long ago perfected the art of looking tall, even without her heels.  “Then I’ll give it to you.”  She circled him once, tracing her nail across the front of his shirt.  “I want to mark you.”

He shrugged.  “If you like.  I’m hardly a blank canvas.”

Well, that was a surprise.  “Let me see.”

His fingers went to the front of his shirt, working his way down the buttons, pulling the tails from his waistband.  His trousers were well made, but not tailored, and new.

She unbuckled his belt, pulled it through the belt loops, leather whispering against wool, and folded it around her hand.  “Shall we use this?”

“Not especially imaginative, but fine,” he said, unbuttoning his cuffs.  He took the shirt off in a smooth gesture, dropped it on the floor with a flourish.

Her eyes darted to the scar on his ribs.  It was an ugly thing.  Sunken, puckered tissue made a trough for a raised, purple ridge that lay within it like a centipede.  She let the belt fall to the floor and ran her finger along the depression, raising her eyes to meet his.

“Stab wound.  Albania.  Partial splenectomy.  Minor post-op complication.”

She smiled grimly.  “That must have been quite a fright for the Ice Man.”

“He took it in stride.”

She walked her fingers over his chest, pausing at his sternum.  A raised line bisected a small constellation of freckles—a deep cut, deliberate, perhaps from a scalpel.

He shrugged.  “Souvenier.”

From this close, she could see others.  They were faint, white on alabaster, and in the creases of his muscles, the hollows of his bones.  Irene traced the scar under his left pectoral muscle with a fingernail.  She walked around him, and felt her breath catch.  Across his back, in a chevron pattern, were faded, but unmistakable, lash marks.

“What happened here,” she asked, “did you get caught shoplifting in Singapore?”

He turned over his shoulder and looked at her, rolling his eyes.  “They punish that by _caning_ , not whipping.  I’m assuming you’re ignorant of the Singaporean penal code, and not the difference between cane and lash marks.”

She ignored him, refusing to let him rile her.  “This was—severe.”

“It disturbed Mycroft far more than the Albanian knife fight.”

“Why?”

“Because it was consensual.  He got rather self-righteous about it.”

She frowned.  She’d used a single tail on occasion, though only one or two bottoms she’d played with had been interested in being struck hard enough to draw blood, and even then, she hadn’t left scars, though Sherlock’s skin was very delicate and fair and probably marked easily.  “Even for a masochist—which you never struck me as—this kind of beating isn’t pleasurable.”

He blinked.  “Of course I didn’t enjoy it.  I _endured_ it.”

She ran her fingertips over the overlapping ‘v’s of  scars, low on his thoracic back.  She felt grudging respect for the precision, the aim.  Almost art.  Whomever had made them had known what they were doing—and had been a ferocious sadist.  His shoulders and the space between them were blank, which she found odd; if she’d been the one to mark him, she’d have left him with wings across both shoulders.  Her eyes widened as she realized he must have had his arms bound at the elbows, must have been pulled up onto his toes.  A small shiver ran up the perfect S curve of her spine.  “This was a punishment,” she said.  

“Yes.”

“What for?”

He turned; her fingers circled around his arm and across his chest, and his smile was pure coquetry. “I doubt the lady in question would appreciate me divulging her name, or the details.  Gentlemen don’t kiss and tell.”

She narrowed her eyes.  “You’re being deliberately evasive.  I suppose it doesn’t matter; the far more important question is, why did you accept it?”

He rolled his eyes.  “I came to you in part because I remember you being moderately clever.   _Think_.”

_Kate, looking up, her face crumpled, eyes rimmed with red and black from tears and running mascara._

“Because you’ve hurt the people you love.  That tends to happen when you let everyone think you’re dead.  You feel guilty about it, and you want to bleed for it.  Not exactly the healthiest coping strategy.”

“Says the woman who was waxing poetic about jumping off of bridges.”

She smiled faintly.  “You’re the one who mentioned jumping, as I recall.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Irene hadn’t been in an exclusive relationship since she was a teenager, and was far too secure in her skills and her own attractiveness to be bothered with petty feelings like jealousy.  Still, something twisted inside her, and she asked a question to which she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted the answer.  “Why me?  And don’t feed me that line again about how remorseful you are about how you behaved before.  Why haven’t you gone back to the woman who did this to you?”

He flinched; he attempted to disguise it as a snort, but Irene wasn’t fooled.

“She won’t have you.”  Her laugh sounded brittle to her ears.  She was too tired to maintain the mask.  The consequences could be disastrous, but the same fatigue kept her from worrying about them.

He swallowed, dropping his eyes to the floor.  “You’re right.  I won’t tell you what I did, but I will tell you that I deserved every bit of my punishment.  I can’t go back to her.”

“I shudder to think of what you must have done that she would pass up the opportunity to do this to you again.”  She smiled, unable to keep the sadness out of it.  “And don’t worry.  I’ve never had any objection to playing second fiddle with you.  I just always assumed it would be to John.”  Another mistake.  She couldn’t imagine anything she might have said that would have been more of a mood killer.  

“John—”  Sherlock gestured vaguely to the scars over his torso, and she noticed a jagged scar along the outside of his left forearm—a defensive wound.  “John wouldn’t understand any of this.”  He brought his eyes up from the floor, meeting hers, and his face softened to the point where he looked almost painfully vulnerable.  “I hoped you might.”

A well of tenderness opened within her, and she placed her palm over the scar on his breastbone.  “I do.  But I won’t be re-creating this.  Not tonight, anyway, not here.”  The possibilities of edge play with Sherlock were intriguing, but Irene refused to allow herself to think they might have any further nights together, and she wasn’t equipped to play so heavily.  Not for the first time, she thought longingly of the playroom she’d left behind in Belgravia.  Her life had become frustratingly short term of late; the constant need to be on the move prevented her from forming stable professional or personal relationships, made it inordinately difficult to build on anything.  Still, she’d spent a great deal of thought on what she might do, in a single night spent in a hotel room with Sherlock Holmes.  

“No,” she continued, walking towards the bedroom, unzipping her dress as she went, feeling his eyes on her back, “I think you’ll have to settle for being flogged, tonight.  I can’t promise you it will be quite as painful as you might have been hoping, but I’m confident I can get your brain to switch off, and that’s something, anyway.”

He followed her.  She opened the wardrobe, shimmied out of her dress, and hung it on a hanger.

She turned around.  “You  _observed_  my measurements, but I never did know if you really  _looked_.”

She wore a black suspender belt with stockings, and a form fitting bustier, mesh and lace, with sheer demi cups, which didn’t so much conceal as accentuate her breasts.  The structure of the undergarments upheld her posture, emphasized her figure.  Sherlock’s eyes flicked over her, but what was in them, she couldn’t say.

“Of course,” she smirked, “it doesn’t matter if you look or not.  It’s about the dress, love, not you.  It’s dry clean only, and I intend to work up a sweat.  Strip.”

He complied, unbuttoning his trousers and shucking them down over his hips, neatly folding them in half and setting them on a dresser.  A knife was strapped his ankle over his sock.

She arched an eyebrow.  “I should have frisked you.”

“Apparently.”  He unbuckled the sheath and set it down next to his clothes, then pulled off his socks.  He stood, staring at her, in charcoal gray boxer briefs.

“All the way.”

He slipped his fingers under the waistband and unceremoniously wriggled out of his pants, kicking them off with his toe.  He left them in a pile on the floor.

She stopped to look at him.  Irene had never been particularly roused by male anatomy, but she was an aesthete, and he was a nearly perfect specimen—tall and straight backed and covered in hard-earned muscle.  The scars only added to his beauty, making him real, less like the sheet-draped statue she remembered and more like—a killer, she realized.  That was the main difference between then and now; the grace he’d always possessed had darkened into something deadly.  It should have been sad, seeing that he’d lost that innocence.  Instead, it sent her blood to her groin.  She swept a bolster pillow off the bed, tossed it on the floor near the foot of it.  She turned and looked at him.  

“I’m not going to restrain you.”

He shrugged, as though indifferent.

“I expect you to stay as positioned, and take what I give you.  This isn’t a roleplay game; you don’t have a safeword.  If you want more, ask me nicely.  If you want me to stop—”

“Beg for mercy, twice.”

Her lips curled upward, the smile spreading to her sparkling eyes.  “Smart boy.”

“I won’t.”

“I shouldn’t think so.  We’ll have to settle for me beating you until my arm gives out, then.  Luckily for you, I’m in good form.”  She tilted her head towards the pillow.

He knelt on it, partially raising his arms, as though unsure what to do with his hands.

“On your head, while we warm up.  Once we get going, you’ll want to bend over and lay on the bed, face down.  You’re not going to be able to stand when I’m done with you.”

He laced his fingers behind his head, flexing his shoulders.  The muscles on his arms and back were more defined than she remembered, though he was hardly bulky.

“The rooms around us are unoccupied—I know what the hotel manager likes.  That said, keep it down, though you don’t strike me as a screamer.”

 

Irene held the handle of the flogger in one hand and the falls in the other.  She had only brought a few toys with her, and this was one of the more versatile.  Bullhide, with narrow falls.  She suspected from the canvas of his back that he would prefer something that would sting, though the leather was heavy enough to provide a fair amount of thud as well.  Irene made a slow, controlled figure eight in the air with the tails, and brought them down across his shoulder on the backhand stroke with a light snap.  He remained still.  She duplicated the gesture on the other side, then continued, moving lower each time, working midway down his back and then back up, in a predictable pattern with gentle pacing, drawing the blood to the surface of his skin.

When his back was flushed, she let her arm drop to her side and stood close behind him, stroking the curls at the nape of his neck.  She leaned downward and around him, tracing the line of his jaw and drawing his face to the side.  He looked at her with narrowed eyes, silently flexing his shoulders while keeping his hands on his head.  She placed her palm over his interlaced fingers.

“All right?” she asked.

“Bored.”

She laughed, and pushed the back of his head forward, lifting one stockinged foot and placing the ball at the small of his back, sliding her toes up along the length of his spine.  When she reached the space between his shoulderblades she pushed down, pressing him forward, face first, into the bed.

He turned his head to the side just in time with a small “humph.”

Irene continued to shift her weight forward, sliding her foot to the nape of his neck, pinning him.  She lay the flogger across his back and slapped his arse, hard, with her open palm, feeling the skin jump under her fingers.  That was lovely, she’d wanted to do that since since he’d shown up in tight trousers to her house in Belgravia.  She raked her nails across his cheeks and did it again.

“Arms out,” she murmured into his ear.

He spread them out on the bed, and she stepped back, taking in the pink skin of his shoulders and the burgeoning splotch on his arse.  She threw the flogger sharply, pulling her wrist back at the last moment, concentrating all the force into the tails and striking the swell of his arse.  The skin rippled.  She did it again on the other side, punching him with the tails, darting back and forth and escalating the rhythm, turning the skin red.  Putting her weight behind it now, she moved up his back again, striking hard, pulling back, licking his flesh with the tips, the narrow falls leaving red marks.  He shifted his weight, widening his knees, but remained silent as she struck him over and over, moving into hard figure eights again.

Irene stopped, stroked the side of his face.  His eyes were closed, but they opened at her touch.  They were dilated, but he seemed present.  His breathing was controlled, his hair damp with sweat.  She brushed her palm down his back, feeling the heat of his reddened skin.  It wasn’t as though she’d expected Sherlock to rub himself against the bedspread.  He’d made it clear that this was a form of penance, that it wasn’t something he did for pleasure.  But she had hoped she might at least be able to get him to drift away a little bit.

“You’re not enjoying this.”

“I thought I was being punished.”

Sherlock was taking her energies and giving back little, not engaging.  She could handle inwardly focused bottoms; it was positively thrilling to push them deeper into themselves, to watch them struggle against their own darkness, but those were masochists who came alive when pushed, who saw pain as something to be savoured, as well as endured.  Irene was skilled at providing the sensation they craved, and while not all her clients were submissives who yearned to grovel at her feet and thank her for that, they at least appreciated it.  Her mind wandered to Kate, exquisitely expressive and generous in her submission, arching her body towards Irene against her restraints, quivering when Irene pierced her with fine needles, ran the wartenberg wheel lightly over the lines of metal embedded in her white skin.  Her wide, brown eyes had always been open, focused on her mistress.  Irene’s throat ached with longing, and she swallowed.

“I agreed to punish you, but on _my_ terms.  And I think it’s clear neither of us is getting what we wanted.”

“Wait.”  He pushed his palms against the bedspread, and her lip quirked a bit to note him struggling.  He grunted a bit and pushed himself to his knees.

“Careful,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

She set the flogger on the bed, rolling her wrist idly.  “Stay put a bit, I can see your knees trembling.  Hold the bed, or better still, lean back over.”

He dropped down onto his ankles, then moved his legs to the side of them, turning around slowly, leaning against the bed.  He looked at her, gray green eyes wide.  A single, sweat slicked curl arched across his forehead.  She brushed it aside with her fingertips.  The bleach-blond hair felt brittle to her touch.

“I am sorry,” he said, “forgive me.”

She studied him, looking down into his face.  He did look—repentant.  It was not a word she would have thought of applying to Sherlock Holmes.  “I accept your apology.”  She kissed him lightly on the forehead, and then straightened, squared her shoulders, and strode across the room to the mini fridge.

Irene took a bottle of still mineral water out of the door and cracked the seal.  Clenching her eyes shut, she took a sip, then let her breath out slowly, willing the tears welling behind her eyelids back, hoping Sherlock would be fuzzy enough not to notice.  She swallowed and took another, gripping the bottle firmly to stop her hands from trembling.

She turned around cautiously.  Sherlock looked dazed, for which she was grateful.  She crossed to him slowly and slid her hand into his hair, stroking it.  “Would you like some water?”

All the color fled from Sherlock’s face, and his whole body went rigid.  His pupils contracted to pinholes, although his eyes were opened wide and wild.  “Please, Sir.”  The words were a plea, thick, broken.

Startled, she dropped his hair, pulled her hand back.  Her blood pounded in her ears.  

Sherlock crumpled at her feet, gripped her ankles and pressed his forehead to the carpeted floor.  He kissed her toes, and licked up the top of the length of her foot; his tongue was warm and wet through her stockings.

Irene had had her feet worshipped by dozens of men.  Even when shame flushed their cheeks, they watched her with hungry, dilated eyes.  Sherlock’s skin was waxy and sheened with sweat, and though he lifted his face towards hers, she wasn’t sure he saw her at all.  He turned his attentions to her other foot, licking along the arch, and pure revulsion rolled up her esophagus and into the back of her throat.  She tried to step back, but his hands tightened around her ankles, like a dangling man gripping the edge of a building, and she lost her balance.  The bottle fell from her hand with a clunking sound, spilling over the carpet next to Sherlock.

He cowered, shrinking from her in a way he never had when she’d beaten him.  “Please,” he begged again, voice raw, “let her go.  I’ll do anything.  Anything at all.”


	3. Just a Swallow

Except for the pale gray line of light at the base of the door, the cupboard was completely dark.  Sherlock crouched in the corner, the dust pan digging into his back.  The rhythmic click of familiar footsteps moved through the hallway, stopping outside the door.  Knuckles rapped dully against the wood.

“Sherlock?”

“Piss off, Mycroft.”

His brother heaved the sigh of the long suffering and underappreciated, then pushed the door open.

Sherlock crept away from the widening slice of light, trying to shirk Mycroft’s gaze, his inescapable, ruthless deductions:

Missing button at his collar

Tangled hair

Grime on the knees of his trousers

Bloodied nose

He drew his legs up to his chest in a vain attempt to cover his body, to hide what he’d done.

 

* * *

 

“What did you say to me, freak?”  Sherlock’s shoulders slammed against the tile, head snapping back hard enough to make lights swirl behind his retinas.

“You wet the bed.  Not your fault, really, most likely a sign your kidneys will fail when you’re older, but your father’s too ignorant to know it’s physiological.  It’s one of the reasons he thinks you aren’t his, you know, ‘no son of mine,’ and all.”

Fingers twisted, lighting his scalp on fire.

“Fucking liar.”

“He’s wrong, of course; one only needs to look at your ugly noses to see the relation.  But your mother’s had so many lovers it’s no surprise he wonders.”

Hands on his lapels again, pulling him away from the wall, making him kneel.

“Take him down, Brandon, take him down.”

A red face leered over him.  “Not so high and mighty now, are you?”

His hair was wrenched forwards again.

“Apologize to me.”

“Or what?”

 

* * *

 

Jim continued to hold Sherlock’s hair with his left hand while he pinched his nose with his right, thrusting into Sherlock's throat again and again, hard, scraping his tonsils.  His lungs burned.  He ground his knees into the concrete.  The pattern of his own blood vessels was visible through his clenched eyelids.

 

* * *

 

He tried vainly to shake his head to the side, pain blooming in his bleeding nose, still firmly clenched between Brandon’s chubby fingers.  The two others each held one of his arms on either side, trapping him on his knees.  He twisted his lips away from the plastic sports bottle being pressed against his mouth.  He was not going to open it.  He’d faint first, see if they could make him swallow then.  The lines between the tiles on the wall behind his assailants began to oscillate.  Tinnitus overwhelmed his ears.  Pain built in his lungs, spreading up from his diaphragm into the back of his throat.

 

* * *

 

“Open your mouth.”

 

* * *

 

He did, inhaling water, spitting and coughing violently.  His nose was still clenched shut and he was going to drown.  You could drown on a teaspoon of water you could—

Brandon slapped him across the face, and Sherlock realized he’d freed his nose to do so and he could have cried with relief, but he wouldn’t, mustn’t show weakness.

Fingers clenched his hair, and the bottle was between his teeth again.

 

* * *

 

Water ran down his chin as he choked again, gasping into Jim’s mouth.  He’d been too dazed from the beating to realize what Jim had wanted until he’d felt his lips crushing against his own, felt Jim’s tongue forcing them apart, the water rushing past them, and then he’d been drowning.  He sputtered, spitting into Jim’s face.

Moriarty pulled back, enraged, and punched him, knuckles smashing into his cheekbone.  His vision blurred; sparkles of green and gold danced in front of his eyes.  Only Jim’s grip in his hair kept him from falling on the floor; he felt a few follicles at the back of his head tear free.  The blow rocked him on his bruised knees, which quailed in protest as he fought for balance.

 

* * *

 

A kick to his buttocks forced him onto his belly.  Hands bent his legs at the knees and pressed his heels into his arse.  Fingers grasped at the waistband of his pants, pulled it up over his trousers, and shoved the toes of his shoes through it.  When he tried to kick his feet free, he pulled his cotton briefs up into his bollocks and felt fire lick out from his groin and up and down his spine into his tense limbs.  His reflexive attempt to curl in on himself only wedged his pants more firmly into his genitals.  Sherlock went limp against the floor, agony girding his pelvis, and felt Brandon’s foot press down against the nape of his neck.  He lay still.

“Utility cupboard.”

Sherlock lashed out again when they dragged him by his wrists across the floor, the bump of the door jamb cracking against his knees.  He managed to twist one arm free, grasped for an ankle, and was rewarded with a shoe stomping on his fingers.  He bit back his pain. The two boys holding his arms threw him unceremoniously through the door onto his stomach.  His chin snapped against the floor.  He tasted blood.  

“Look what I found,” Brandon smirked, and Sherlock rolled onto his side, looking up in the direction of Brandon’s gaze.  On the shelf next to bottles of cleaning supplies and a tool box was a roll of silver duct tape.

Sherlock made a lunge for the door, hurtling his shoulder into Brandon’s shins, and the older boy staggered back.  One of the others grabbed him by the collar, tearing a button free, and threw him down again; he landed roughly on his hands and knees.  Pain lanced up his outstretched palms and flexed wrists.  A shoe caught his forearm, kicking it out from under him, and he fell forward onto his face again, biting back a cry as his arms were wrenched behind him.  He heard the rough, squeaking sound of the tape being unrolled, and then he felt hands shoving up his sleeves, passing the roll of tape around his both his wrists, making several wraps up his forearms.

“Get his feet.”

Each of them grasped one of his ankles and pulled his shoes free of his pants, which snapped against his waist.  He kicked out and made solid contact with someone’s shin, which was momentarily satisfying, but they brought his legs together and wrapped the tape over his trouser cuffs.  They held his legs straight behind him, as though preparing for a wheelbarrow race, though of course his arms were useless and all his weight was on his chest.  The buttons of his jacket pressed uncomfortably into his ribs.

Brandon’s meaty hands wormed under his belly, fumbled with the buckle of his belt.  The leather pulled free, whistling through belt loops, and then he felt the fingers working between his forearms, threading it between them, and then the same with his shins.  Brandon pulled the belt to it’s tightest setting and buckled it.

Sherlock’s heart sank as he heard the shriek of tape again; a short length was wrapped around the belt, sealing the buckle closed.  He flexed his knees experimentally, pulling the leather taught.  He had about a foot of slack between his wrists and his ankles.

“Tape his mouth,” one of them suggested, and the other chuckled.

Sherlock’s breath caught as he thought of tape being wrapped around his head, sticking to his hair, needing to have it cut out, no way to hide it before Mycroft came to collect him and take him home for Christmas—

Brandon shook his head.  “No.  He needs to be able to speak.”  He poked Sherlock’s head with his toe.  “We’ll let you out when you admit you just make this shit up to pretend you’re clever.  Or, we can find out which one of us is really the pants wetter.”

 

* * *

 

“You had your opportunity to drink _water_ ,” Jim snarled, and leaned over him, dropping his voice to a whisper, “and you spat it at me.  Why’d you waste it, Sherlock?” Jim’s breath was hot against his ear.  “Afraid I’ll make you beg me to use the loo?”

 

* * *

 

Breathe.  That was the most important thing.  Getting his racing pulse rate down.  Sherlock turned his head to the side, taking in deep breaths and holding them until his lungs burned, letting out slow, shuddering exhalations.  He rocked carefully, tilting his body from side to side, building momentum in an attempt to roll himself over.  He ignored the way that motion pressed against his bladder.  It had been foolish to wait so long, but he’d known that Brandon and his cronies were planning on ambushing him in the loo.  He’d considered slipping outside and finding a secluded place on the grounds instead, and he had written off that idea as only postponing the inevitable.  Better to force a confrontation now and dispel the tension that had been brewing all term.  He’d thought that if he exposed Brandon’s secret, the regard in which the others held their leader might be diminished.  For once, Sherlock might not be their preferred target.  He had underestimated both the degree to which Brandon held sway over them and the ferocity of his response.  

He took another breath and tested his binds.  The first few passes were against his skin, and the rest was over his jacket sleeves.  The tape was tight, but not enough to cut off circulation.  He focused on the belt, straining his fingers behind him, brushing against the leather.  He flicked it into his thumbs and began painstakingly pulling it, feeling the leather slide between his forearms and shins.  The tape covered buckle caught on his trousers.  Sherlock tugged with all the paltry leverage he could muster, pinching the belt hard between his thumbs and fingers, but it didn’t budge.  His whole body bowed, straining upward as he tried to stretch his limbs apart, and his abdominal muscles and thighs began to burn from the exertion.  Sweat beaded his forelock.  At last, the belt gave and slid forward, the buckle sliding between his bound legs.  He worked the leather between his thumbs again until he felt the tape in his shaking fingers.  

Sherlock took another breath.  Even though they’d forced him to drink, his mouth was dry.  He swallowed, licked his lips, and tried to ignore the way the sweaty strands in his face had begun to itch.  Rubbing his forehead against the floor did little.  He reached for the buckle again, ran the ball of his thumb over the surface until he found its edge, and worked the tip of his thumb nail against the tape.  Adhesive gummed under his nails, tore his cuticles back as he clawed his way underneath, working his fingers back and forth until the tape twisted and stuck to itself.  The tape caught the edge of one of his nails, and sliced between it and the nail bed.  He bit his cheeks until he tasted blood to stifle his pain.

Long moments passed in which he quavered slightly, clenching his fists, before he was willing to continue.  He began to claw again, more carefully, this time, but still, each scratch made his nail throb.  He persisted until he could roll the tape between his fingers like an extra loop on the belt, and then set about pushing the leather backwards with his thumb while holding the buckle steady in his hand.  Just when the leather would start to move back, he’d slump in the binds and pull it taught again, and the strain of holding his wrists and ankles close enough together to keep the belt slack was making him tremble.

When he finally pushed the belt through its loop and the tape, he let himself collapse onto his side, taking a few moments to catch his breath and relieve the pressure on his bladder before attempting to undo the buckle.  Hands still shaking, he tugged the leather hard, pulling the tongue free of the hole and past it, drawing his bound limbs even closer together than before.  It was pure anguish, but he felt the tongue pull free.  He was determined not to let it slide back.  Holding the tail of the belt with his left hand, he fumbled for the tongue with his right thumb, working his nail underneath it, and grasped the buckle with his fingers.  He rocked back and forth, pulling the belt through the buckle bit by bit, burning his fingers, until, with a final tug, it released.  He choked out a sob of relief as he straightened his legs to the floor.

“How’re you doing in there?” Brandon asked through the door, to a chorus of laughter.

Sherlock froze; if they walked in on him now, they would re-tie him, and perhaps beat him again, and all of his efforts would be for nothing.  He lay silent.

“Anything you want to say, freak?  Anything you want to ask me?”

 

* * *

 

Sherlock’s pulse quickened, and he hated that tell, because Jim was close enough to see it; his nose nearly touched his neck.

“Oh yes,” Jim whispered.  “Big Brother told me all about that.  Don’t worry, I’m not one for Freudian head games.  I prefer to get right to the— _point_.”  He smirked at his own joke.  

Sherlock felt ill with apprehension.

Jim flicked his tongue along Sherlock’s ear before moving his lips directly over the canal.  “I am going to piss down your throat, and you are going to swallow it.  Tell me, what do you have to say to that?”

He was shaking.  Adrenaline, exhaustion, possibly the early stages of hypothermia.  It was not fear.

Moriarty moved his lips against Sherlock’s neck, resting them over his fluttering carotid, and for a moment he was certain Jim would bite.  Jim chuckled, knowingly, so low it was more of a vibration emanating from his warm lips through Sherlock’s cold, sweat soaked skin.

His eyes found Molly’s.  She was curled a few yards away, knees drawn up to her chest, arms locked around them.  The edges of the livid cane marks were visible on the parts of her thighs not covered by her shins and ankles.

He swallowed, turning his eyes back to the floor.  “Yes, Sir.”

 

* * *

 

“No?”  Brandon asked.  “Well, let me know if you change your mind.  Just the prefects here, now, you know.  Of course you know.  Your faggot brother was a prefect.  But he’s not here anymore, is he?”  

The others chortled.

Sherlock lay still, heart racing.

“Hope you haven’t got a train to catch, or anything.  I think I might sing a bit.  You know, to pass the time.”  He cleared his throat.  “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.”

Sherlock ground his teeth and rolled onto his back, squishing his hands.  If he could get them in front he might be able to break the tape around his wrists by striking his chest with enough force—something he knew was possible in theory; his wrists were facing each other, which meant he could brace his thumbs and angle the blow so all the force struck the tape on the space between them.  He flexed experimentally, seeing how far he could spread his wrists apart, and his heart sank.  His wrists were bound too closely together and the tape went too high up his forearms.  He wasn’t going to be able to separate them enough to get a strike in the right place, even if he managed to get them in front of him.  His other options were to tear it with his teeth, or roll it on itself until he could work it over his wrists, like he’d done with the bit around the belt.  Of course, getting out of his binds was only half the battle; he’d still have to fight his way out—but he suspected flinging the door open and smashing Brandon over the head with the mop handle would give them a surprise.

“Rain, rain, go away.  Little Sherlock’s going to pay.”

He drew his knees as tightly as he could to his chest, ignoring the way the position increased his growing urgency.  The easiest way would be to work his bound wrists down below his hips and push his legs between them; he’d stepped through handcuffs this way dozens of times.  He clenched his jaw and tucked himself into a tight ball, wriggling his hands under his arse.  It took only a few moments for him to realize this wasn’t going to work.  The chains which connected handcuffs let him spread his arms wide enough to get his body through; he had known the tape went too high up his forearms to simply step through it, but he had hoped he could scrunch it down on itself until it was low enough.  It was wrapped around his jacket sleeves, however, and he found that no amount of rubbing it against his back would induce it to roll.  His bladder was beginning to throb, and each dull pulse of pain was reminding him that time was not on his side.  His struggle against the tape was only increasing his discomfort.

A small, plaintive voice in the back of his head tentatively suggested that he could always give Brandon what he wanted—tell them everything was a lie, ask them to let him out—but more than Sherlock loathed the thought of groveling before these brainless imbeciles, he feared that it was a trap, another vicious move in this increasingly cruel game.  He was not going to beg only to be denied.

 

* * *

 

“Oh come on.”

Sherlock was avoiding Jim’s gaze, but he could hear the roll of his eyes.

“I know you can beg more convincingly than _that_.”

Could he?  His racked his mind palace for images of penitents, supplicants, worshipers, and he settled on the last, folding himself into a bow, prostrating himself at Jim’s feet. “Please,” he said, again, with what he hoped sounded like fervor.

“Better,” Jim said, his voice low.  “Not good enough.”

It wasn’t sufficient, Sherlock realized, for him to obey, to show submission.  Jim wanted to humiliate him, to degrade him.  He stretched his fingers out towards Jim’s feet, making no attempts to hide the tremors in them, and leaned his head forward, intending to kiss Jim’s shoe.  Then he told himself he might as well go all the way and dragged his tongue across the toe.  He tasted shoe polish and leather.

Jim lifted Sherlock’s chin with the tip of his shoe, looking down at him.  His eyes were feral and gleaming.  “Lick the sole,” he said, voice thick with arousal, “and _beg_.”

Objectively, there was reason why it should be so hard, to do this one, small thing, after everything else.  He wasn’t sure what pride he had left to offend.  The sole of Jim’s shoe tasted like factory dust and pavement and earth, and small grains of grit stuck to his tongue.  His mouth was dry.  He was dehydrated; he knew that, had silently rebuked Molly for rebuffing Jim’s offer of water only moments before.  He glanced at the bottle, and then fixed his gaze on Jim’s dilated eyes.  “Please, Sir?” he begged.  “Just a swallow?”

 

* * *

 

“And if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there'll be six green bottles hanging on the wall.”

Sherlock banged his head against the wall he’d been rubbing his bound wrists against, squeezing back tears of frustration, trying to blot out the latest bellowed chorus.  He’d already endured “It’s Raining, it’s Pouring,” “Little Drops of Water,” and a rousing rendition of “Sherlock Holmes is Going Down,” sung to the tune of “London Bridge” with poorly metered, homophobic lyric substitutions.

His wrists were raw where the rolled tape edges rubbed against him, and the pads of his fingers were covered in blisters.  He’d wriggled halfway out of his jacket and managed to bunch it up around his forearms, but couldn’t budge it over the tape around his wrists, though he’d scrunched the bands down to a few inches.  Another possible maneuver for bringing his wrists in front of him had been niggling at the back of his mind.  He had successfully brought his cuffed hands over his head on more than one occasion.  His shoulders were hyper flexible, and it was possible for him to twist his wrists around one another and bring his elbow up behind his back and over his head.  Again, a simple enough feat in handcuffs, but he’d tried it earlier and found it impossible with the tape; he simply could not rotate his wrists to the degree necessary.  He knew, in theory, that it was possible to bring even tightly bound wrists straight over the head—provided he was willing to dislocate his shoulders.

At this point, however, the fullness in his bladder and the exertion of holding it back had gotten to the point that he felt nauseated.  He pulled away from the wall and curled his legs under himself, shifting to a kneeling position.  Steeling himself against the pain, he tucked his head down, pressed his forehead into the floor, extended his wrists up and over as far as they would go, and then kept pushing.

 

* * *

 

Sherlock clenched his trapezius muscles with all his remaining strength as gravity inexorably pulled him down, steepening the angle at which his wrists were pulled behind his back.  His bruised toes flailed at the ground (only a few, taunting inches out of reach) straining for purchase that had been ripped from him when Moran had hoisted the rope.  Vertigo threatened to overwhelm him as he spun haplessly from his wrists.  He might have vomited if his diaphragm had been functional, but it fluttered uselessly; his breathing weakened to shallow, rapid panting—until the whip darted out like a snake, coiling around his forearms, wrenching his body back and forth.  He could actually _feel_ his muscle fibres tearing, and he found air to scream.

 

* * *

 

The pain was worse than anything he’d imagined.  Sherlock ground his teeth together, clenched his eyes shut, curled his toes tightly inside his shoes—and the pressure of his own body bearing down on his bladder finally made it give way.  A spurt of wet heat leaked through the front of his pants.  He dropped his arms down, clenching his pelvic muscles with everything he had, but his body had already felt the promise of release, and he realized he lacked the will—he was afraid to bring his arms up over his head again, his shoulders were crying out in protest—and he simply let go, let the piss run down his leg, let the tears stream down his face, let the pain flow out of him.

 

* * *

 

Even though he’d tried to prepare himself for it, the taste—warm, acrid, salty—made him gag.  He quickly began to swallow, mindful of Jim’s threat:

_If you spill so much as a drop, Molly will lick it off the floor._

He kept his lips flush to Jim’s groin.  Moriarty’s eyes were lazy and hooded, and he curled one hand in Sherlock’s hair and absently caressed his cheek with the other, fingertips lingering over the bruises.

He found himself uncertain what to do with his hands; his arms hung like dead weights at his sides, still throbbing, and he found himself, absurdly, wishing he were still bound, that Jim had left the ring gag in place.  It would be easier if this were being forced on him, if Jim had shoved himself through the gag into his mouth, if he had held the knife to his throat again.  That was what made his chest heavy and his cheeks burn, that he had agreed to this, offered this, allowed himself to be used while he knelt passively and fought, with every fibre of his being, the urge to spit, to vomit, to bite, to scream—

—and then it was over; he felt the stream passing between his lips taper into a trickle, sucked the last drops clean.  Jim pushed him back onto his heels, zipped his flies, and, with a smile that was equal parts deranged and fond, ruffled Sherlock’s hair—petting him, letting him know he’d been a good boy.  

“See,” he said.  “You can be neat when properly motivated.”

 

* * *

 

Sherlock slumped forward, laying his chest against his knees, not even bothering to lift his forehead from the floor.  Wetness wicked into his shirt, bringing the offensive, ammonia odor closer to his nostrils, but it seemed pointless to worry about it anymore.  He knew he would need to start working at the tape again, but at the moment, he lacked the strength.

The rough squeak of shoes running across the hall cut through the singing, which abruptly stopped.

“Someone’s coming.”

“Shit!”

Sherlock cocked his head, straining for sounds.

A flurry of footsteps followed, all in different directions.  

He tensed, flexing his wrists against the tape, then drew himself to his knees with great effort and waddled towards the door, leaned his ear against it, debating whether or not to call out.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to be found like this; it might be better to wait, to get himself unbound, to slink out on his own terms.

A single set of footstfalls continued, steadily towards him, and after a few echoes rebounded through the hall, he recognized the gait.  He recoiled back from the door, falling as he attempted to back away on his knees, landing heavily without the use of his arms.  He scuttled backwards into the farthest corner of the closet, banging his back into a dustpan.  The mop fell over, clattering on the floor.  The footsteps stopped, then hurried towards him.

 

* * *

 

He sat, shivering, as Mycroft gingerly cupped his face, and held still long enough for them to clip the ropes digging into his wrists with the trauma shears.  He realized these were the same shears he’d cut through Molly’s knickers with, and his eyes spilled over again.  His brother stared into his face, brows knit with concern, and he realized how his countenance must look, what would be written on it for Mycroft to see.  The bruise across his cheek—would Mycroft be proud that he’d fought, or think him a fool for resisting?  The raw spots on the corners of his lips from the ring gag, the (his cheeks burned) peeling flakes of dried semen on his face, in his hair.  He bit his lip, tasting blood again, and pulled his hands in front of him as soon as the last rope snapped, ignoring the way the muscles grated against one another, and clutched his arms, tilting back and forth in the foetal position while someone draped a blanket over his trembling shoulders.  

 

* * *

 

“I’m sorry, Sherlock,” Mycroft told him, “but this is going to hurt.”

Sherlock refused to look at his brother or respond to what he’d said.

Mycroft hesitated a few moments, as though waiting for a protest, but when none came, he began delicately snipping the tape with the scissors attachment of his Swiss army knife, trying to cut his wrists apart without disturbing the areas where the adhesive contacted his skin.  Even so, the small movements pulled out hairs, and Sherlock winced.  Once the few inches touching his wrists were loose, Mycroft switched to the knife attachment, sawing through the layers of tape around his sleeves.  He did the same with his legs, cutting the tape around the cuffs of his trousers.  Sherlock spread his ankles apart, but remained on his knees.

“Let’s get out of here,”  Mycroft said, extending his hand.  

Sherlock refused it and stood on his own, bracing himself against the wall.  Prickling sensations swarmed over his legs, as though insects were crawling over them.  Once he was confident he wasn’t going to fall over, he unbuttoned his trousers.

“I don’t—” Mycroft began, and stopped.

Sherlock ignored him and pushed them down to his ankles, nose wrinkling at the pungent odor.  He sat on the floor, avoiding the puddle of his own piss, and unlaced his shoes, pulling them off.  He wriggled awkwardly, pointing his toes, tugging his trouser cuffs and the tape down past his ankles until at last he could kick them off.  He shucked his pants down over his hips for good measure.

For a few moments, Mycroft stood, silently, clearly uncomfortable.  

Good, Sherlock thought.  That made them even.  Made them the same.  He threw his jacket on the floor next to his trousers, and then started unbuttoning his shirt.

Mycroft looked away and silently took off his coat.

Sherlock glanced at it.  Burberry.  Meticulously cleaned.  He shook his head.  “No.”  He found a roll of bin liners on one of the shelves in the cupboard, ripped one off, stuffed his shirt into it, then collected his soiled clothes from the floor and threw them in, as well.

Another awkward silence passed.

“You have to put something on, Sherlock.”

He glared at his brother.  “What for?”

For a moment Mycroft was at a loss for words, off balance.  He shrugged and draped his coat around Sherlock’s shoulders.  “Because people will _see_.”

 

* * *

 

Sherlock turned away from Molly and Mycroft, giving them a full view of his back.  “Did you want _this_?” He let the blanket he’d wrapped around him like a toga fall to his waist.  The synthetic fleece had adhered to his cuts, and he winced as it pulled them open again.  All of the fury he felt towards himself, towards Jim, now turned towards Molly.  She had bent his rage like a mirror deflecting a laser with her accusation:

_You didn’t ask me._

As if he’d had an opportunity, or a choice.

“Sherlock,” Mycroft warned.

“Shut up, Mycroft!” He was furious with his brother.  It was why he’d refused to let the medics treat him, to change his clothes, to wash his face.  As if showering would make him clean.  As if bandages would make him healed.  As if clothing could cover his shame.

He whirled on both of them, clutching the blanket around him with one hand, tempted to throw it on the floor, to make them look at him.  To make Mycroft see what his carelessness had done to him, to make Molly see what his sentiment had made him do for her.  But, as much as he wanted to, his fingers were unwilling to release their hold on the bloodstained fleece.

“Did you want him to sodomize you?”  He asked Molly.  He refused to euphemize.  “Because there were other, more obvious—configurations—suggested by that last position.

 _Molly gave a low wail of pain, and he_  felt  _Jim force himself inside her._

“I was  _relieved_  when Jim fucked me.  I was _grateful_ , and if you had any sense, you would be, too.”

“Sherlock!”  His brother all but shouted, and he whirled towards him, preparing a devastating retort.

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot say, Mycroft.  Don’t tell me I’ll regret it.  I regret nothing!”

“Sherlock.”  The voice was softer, this time, but still emphatic.

“Nothing,” he whispered.  And if Molly’s face was white with fear, if he’d done that to her, than so be it.  

“Sherlock.”

“What would you have done?” he asked.  “What would you have had me do?”

“Focus.”

He blinked.

“Look at me.”

He looked at her, into her bright, blue eyes, and—Molly’s eyes weren’t blue.

“There you are,” she murmured.

His breath caught.  “Irene.”

“Yes.”

“I—” he looked around.  She was crouched in front of him, in a set of black lingerie, her short, honey colored hair fallen into her face.  He was in a hotel room.  No, a suite.  He looked out the window.  Budapest.  The events of the evening came flooding back to him, and he held his head in his hands, trying to wade through the blur of images.  “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve said that a lot, tonight.”

He bit his lip.  “What else did I say?”

Her eyes flashed, challenging.  “What do you think you said?”

“I—”  Brandon, Jim, Mycroft, Molly, god no, Molly.  “I don’t know,” he whispered.

Irene stood up and pulled a throw off the bed and thrust it towards him.

He blinked, then reached out and took it, wrapped it around his shoulders.

She crossed to the mini-fridge and took a bottle of Unicum out of the freezer.  She poured a double into a frosted shot glass and handed it to Sherlock.

He wrinkled his nose.  “I never liked bitters.”

“It’s medicinal.”

“Putting a red cross on a bottle doesn’t mean it’s—oh never mind,” he muttered, and took the glass.  He sniffed the pungent, herbal aroma, then knocked it back.  It tasted like echinacea.  At least it was cold.  

“I think,” Irene said, pouring a glass for herself, “it’s time you started telling me the truth.”


	4. Easier for Whom

The Unicum slithered down her throat, icy cold and alcohol hot at the same time, dark and bitter on her palate. She swallowed and set the glass down with a clack. Her fingers were trembling. She took the bottle across the room, setting it on the nightstand. Sherlock still sat slumped on the floor, leaning against the bed, absently twisting the throw in his fingers. Irene returned to the cupboard in the hallway, took out one of the hotel’s monogrammed dressing gowns, and brought it to Sherlock, setting it beside him on the bed. He ignored it.

She remembered how Sherlock’s blue silk had felt, cool and smooth against her naked skin, smelling of him. His flat had been an extension of himself, confident in its taste and comfortable in its habits. It had felt natural, easy, to slip into his home, into his bed, into his clothes. They had so clearly suited him; it was easy to make them suit her. They were alike, she had thought, once.

The hotel suite was chic but impersonal. He might have assumed she would be in her element, but Irene still hadn’t adapted to working out of hotels again. This wasn’t her space. And Sherlock—she wasn't sure she knew him anymore.

She sat cross legged in front of him; facing him head on was more confrontational, but it also gave her a better view of his body language. “Well?”

He blinked at her.

“It’s clear you were trying to re-enact some kind of trauma. Since you seemed to think you could use me to fix you, how about telling me what kind.”

“You’re angry with me.”

“Still the clever detective, aren’t you?”

“I’m—” he visibly bit his lip to keep from saying ‘sorry.’

She sighed, because he clearly meant it. “The worst part of it, is, if you had just been honest with me, I might have gone along with it, eventually.”

“Eventually.”

“It’s generally a terrible idea, using BDSM as therapy, but I’ve done it before. Works rather better when both parties know that’s what they’re doing.”

“That’s—” he stared at the floor, “I wasn’t trying to—”

“Then enlighten me, because I’m apparently terrible at reading you.”

His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I have no idea what I was thinking.” He pressed the pads of his fingers to his forehead. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Clearly.” She shifted positions so that she was sitting next to him, leaning against the bed. “I do care for you, Sherlock.”

He was silent.

“And clearly, you were hurt, are hurting, badly. Which is why I’m sitting on the floor with you and asking you to talk, instead of throwing you out of my bedroom. I’m choosing to interpret your stunt tonight as a cry for help. But you try to manipulate me like that again and we are done.”

He nodded, stiffly, and his face was white. “Yes—” he pressed his lips together.

Irene winced. “Why don’t we start with how you keep wanting to call me, ‘Sir.’”

He flinched, and didn’t answer.

“Fine. Tell me why you made up this story about a woman. Did you think I’d find it more intriguing?”

“There _was_ a woman,” he protested.

She rolled her eyes.

“That much was true. And I did—hurt her.” He swallowed, and the misery on his features made her believe him. A small knot of apprehension formed in her belly.

For a few moments, neither of them spoke. The refrigerator kicked on in the other room, giving off a low hum.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, Irene?”

She smiled, cloaking herself in her armour again. “Can’t you deduce it?”

He gave her a long look through narrowed eyes. “Let’s say I have my suspicions.”

_Come off it, Irene. You knew. You know my methods. You knew what would happen when you said, “please fix it, Jim.” Don’t pretend you’ve grown a conscience, now. It’s beneath you. We both know you’re only upset because you’ve lost your pet. Shall I find you another who looks just like her?_

“But I’m not going to deduce you,” Sherlock continued. “I’m merely pointing out that it’s what you’re asking of me.”

“Ah, but the difference is, _I_ didn’t come in here under false pretenses, asking for punishment without telling you that I might have a PTSD induced panic response to some fairly routine aftercare.”

He pouted. “Do you really think I could function in the world if I had an irrational fear of _water_?”

You said quite a bit about water when you were panicking, she thought, but held her tongue.

“It was a combination of factors I couldn’t have anticipated. I promise you, I would not have agreed to our activities if I had foreseen—” he gestured to himself “—this.”

“I don’t know what happened to you, Sherlock, because you aren’t telling me. But let us say I also have my suspicions, and I suspect that a response like you exhibited was foreseeable. You used me. Perhaps you didn’t intend for me to trigger you, but you knew that I could, and you did not inform me, and you did not ask me if I would still be willing to participate, given the circumstances.”

A sheen of sweat broke out on Sherlock’s colourless face, and he went so still, not even breathing, that for a moment she was afraid he would faint, or that she would lose him, again.

“Sherlock?”

He began to chuckle, a low, deep rumble that shook his entire body. He bowled over, his chin wrinkling in a way that should not have been possible on a man so lean, and began to _giggle_ , clutching the throw around his shoulders, pausing only to wheeze for air before collapsing into another fit of laughter.

Irene drew herself back a bit, unsure what to say, or do.

He looked at her, suddenly sober, and slumped against the bed again. “‘You never asked me.’ That’s exactly what she said.”

Irene sat next to him, tentatively laying a hand on his shoulder.

He leaned into her touch, and she relaxed. It had been a risk, making physical contact. “Who is she?” Irene asked.

“Not my secret to tell.”

“Fine. But you have my discretion, if you want it.”

“You exploit your clients’ secrets for blackmail.”

She bristled. “I thought you knew me better than that. Never blackmail. Only protection. I’m not an extortionist; I simply want for people to be on my side when I need them to be. And you’re not a _client,_ Sherlock.”

He sat for a long moment, staring at the crown moulding along the ceiling. “Why do criminals always confess?” he asked. “Does it unburden them? It doesn’t change anything.”

“Sometimes it helps to get the thoughts out of your head. To face them. Make them real.”

“I can’t have this conversation naked.”

She inclined her head towards the robe. “Then get dressed.”

He shook his head. "I want proper clothes. You _will_ throw me out of your room after, and I’ll not wander the hotel in a dressing gown.”

“I recall you strutting about London in a bedsheet.”

“Much has changed since then.”

She fetched his clothes from on top of the dresser and set them on the floor next to him. Sherlock stood up and dressed slowly, fumbling into his socks and pants. His hands were shaking. She helped him with his shirt buttons, tried not to let her gaze linger too long on the scar over his sternum as she did them up. He lay on the bed and wriggled into his trousers, tucking his shirt tails in. The belt he left off. He wound it tightly around his hand, like a weapon, and held it taut between white fingers. Irene thought it looked like he was clutching it to comfort himself, not like he intended to use it against her, but she sat at the opposite corner of the bed, leaving some space between them, just in case.

“You’ve deduced that I was sexually assaulted,” he began.

Irene was glad he was able to say it. That was a good sign.

“What you may not understand, is that it was, in fact, my goal.”

She waited. The refrigerator kicked off again, leaving the room in silence.

“I allowed my adversary to use my body as a means of distracting him. The experience was… unpleasant.”

She had seen the mess of scars on his back. More importantly, she had seen him _cower_ in front of her while reliving his memories. She would have used harsher words than ‘unpleasant’ to describe her own, secondary experience with his trauma.

As though reading her thoughts, he conceded, “There have been some lasting physical and psychological consequences, as you have unfortunately witnessed. But I foresaw all this from the beginning. I imagined it would be worse, even. I initiated the encounter anyway. I suppose you understand.”

“Why do you think I understand?” Irene probed.

“Isn’t that what you—”

“Not at all. Sherlock, I choose my clients, and what I do and don’t do with them. I don’t have sex with clients because I don’t want to. And if you had sex with a person, or in a fashion, you didn’t want to, and they knew it, then that was rape, not sex work. Whether you initiated it or not.”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m not calling either of us a prostitute.”

She kept her face carefully blank, not willing to show him anything that could fuel his deductions.

His fingers tightened around the belt. “Tell me you’ve never allowed yourself to lose a battle to win a war, Irene. Tell me you’ve never accepted short term suffering while thinking of the long game. Tell me you’ve never laid a trap for someone and used yourself as bait.”

“I have done,” she admitted.

“As have I. And I am _winning_. No doubt you’re aware. A person who was once as intertwined in his network as you were, who is wanted dead by as many of his former associates you are, would have to have noticed my—” he bit the word fiercely, “—progress.”

“My god,” Irene whispered. “You mean...” the room felt suddenly smaller.

_Do it do it do it. You know you want to. But you can’t. You don’t have the guts._

“You mean Moriarty. He raped you.”

He turned his face away.

She took a deep breath. “Sherlock. Why would you—I would never throw you out, for telling me that.”

He smirked. “Of course you wouldn’t. I’m a victim. And we mustn’t blame the victim.”

“You’re a survivor.”

“Spare me your clichés.” He rolled himself into a seated position and threaded his belt through the loops. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.” He swung his legs off the bed and stood up.

“Sherlock,” she commanded.

He froze.

“It’s what you did to survive, isn’t it? That’s what you came here wanting me to punish you for.”

He stood still for a long moment, silent and with his back to her.

“It’s to do with this woman. The one you won’t name.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a brutal world. We all do terrible things to survive. And Moriarty’s price is always higher than it says on the tag.”

“She told me I could have anything. And I took everything. Then I tried to pay it back, but it was too late.”

Irene thought of Kate, blinking back tears. _I don’t know who you are, anymore. I don’t think you do, either._ She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I understand.”

He whirled around, and his eyes were hard, colorless, like chips of dirty ice. “You couldn’t possibly understand. Ask me the worst thing that I’ve done, Irene.” He thrust his chin forward. “You’ve been trying to get me to bare my soul, go on, ask me.”

She curled her legs under her on the bed, and met his gaze, levelly. “What did you do?”

“I raped her.”

She felt as though he’d reached into her chest and squeezed. Because however much Sherlock had changed, she knew him—and she knew Jim—well enough to know it was more complicated than that. “Oh, Sherlock,” she whispered, drawing herself to standing. She padded across the bed on her stockinged feet and pulled him to her; his head was level with her belly, and she pressed his face against it and stroked his hair. “I’m sorry,” she said, “so sorry.”

He tensed against her, and she widened her stance in case he intended to push her off him, but instead he gripped her fiercely, arms tightening around her hips hard enough to bruise. He dropped to his knees, sliding his forehead down the length of her legs slowly, and buried his face in the mattress between her feet, arms around her calves. Irene stood still as an idol for him, let him offer his guilt, his grief, his shame. When he finally let go of her, she sank to a squat and then sat down, slid one of her legs on either side of him, and pulled his head into her lap.

“I understand now, what you came here for. But I can’t forgive you.”

“I know.”

“Not because it’s unforgivable,” she stroked his fragile, blond hair, “but because you have to be the one to forgive yourself.”

“I can’t,” he groaned the words into her thigh, and his voice was thick with desperation.

“You must. Sherlock, you must, or Moriarty wins.”

“I should have let him win. I should have jumped off that rooftop. He was right; it would have been easier.”

“Easier for whom?”

“ _Everyone_.” There was a lilt in his voice, a parody of an Irish accent, and it chilled her. “Everyone thinks I’m dead anyway, except for her, and my brother, and both of them would probably be better off not having lived through that.”

“She’s alive, then?” Irene had been afraid to ask.

“Yes.”

“If she loved you, she may not agree.” Irene had an inkling who ‘she’ might be; she remembered Jim gloating about fake-dating a pathologist who Sherlock had been stringing along to get access to Bart’s morgue. Irene knew how convenient it could be to have friends in that industry when you wanted to disappear. She considered, not without bitterness, that if she’d cultivated a friendship with a pathologist as well as the records keeper, she might not have had to go to Jim, and then Kate might not have—but what good would come of playing that game? It was hypocritical of her to dwell on the past while she was telling Sherlock to move forward.

“I am confident she doesn’t love me anymore.”

“Well. I love you. And I’m glad you’re here.”

He lifted his head from her lap. His eyebrows were knit tightly together. “Why?” he asked. “Why would you love me? Why would anyone love me?”

She laughed to keep herself from crying. “Because you’re the great Sherlock Holmes, the clever detective in the funny hat.”

He rose up on his knees and clasped her face in both hands. “That was never the reason.”

She felt suddenly exposed, and not because she was clad in only lingerie. “But it _was._ Watching you traipse around London in your self-portait disguises. That deerstalker. The bedsheet. You reminded me of how it felt when the game was still fun, before the stakes got so high, before I got involved with—I’m sorry.”

He released her face and dropped his hands to his sides. “You’ve said his name three times, and I haven’t turned into a pillar of salt, yet.”

She’d said ‘Moriarty,’ three times. The moniker that had nearly spilled from her lips was ‘Jim.’ It felt like a betrayal to refer to him in such a familiar way.

“That’s how I deduced the passcode to your phone, by the way.”

Irene arched an eyebrow.

“You said he was ‘your kind of man.’”

She winced. She should have known that Sherlock would see through that lie, realize that Jim wasn’t anyone’s kind of man, perhaps even that he would intuit who might be. “Sherlock, I didn’t mean any of the things I said.”

“I know.” He ran the ball of his thumb over her wrist, and Irene realized that Sherlock was, once again, taking her pulse. She knew it was racing. She closed her eyes to hide her pupils.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

She blinked her eyes open, and stared into his. They were blown equally wide, like new moons, a sliver of silver around the black.

He continued to hold her wrist in his right hand and placed his left at the nape of her neck, pressed their foreheads together. “Do you still want to have dinner with me?”


	5. Look at Us Both

Sherlock’s right hand curled around Irene’s occipital bun and rested on her pulse point, which surged under the pads of his fingers.  His nose brushed hers; his lips parted and hovered over her mouth.  They breathed shared air, which crackled, as if with ozone before an electric storm.

He _had_  desired Irene.  He hadn’t allowed himself to act on it, because he’d decided he was done with physical and emotional entanglements.  But he’d remembered the hourglass lines of her body when he’d input her measurements into her safe, the crimson curves of her lips when he’d pulled the black silk cord suggesting rope from the red foil surrounding his Christmas present.  He’d wondered how her face would appear, contorted in pleasure, each of the seventy-three times she’d sent him a text and he’d heard her—

_Tell me, Molly, are you embarrassed by the thought of other people watching you ‘express sexual arousal’?  Would that humiliate you?_

He shook his head, trying to clear the wasps that were swarming between his ears.  Reality was a hornets’ nest: paper thin and full of holes.  

“Sherlock.” The mattress shifted under her as she turned her head away, exposing her throat.

He caught a whiff of Chopard; she’d kept some of her old habits.  Dangerous.  Sentimental.  He leaned forward on his knees, placed his nose against her jaw and inhaled the scent, tangling his fingers in her shorter, lightened curls.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she breathed, lips inches from his.

“It’s a _terrible_ idea.  And you want to.”

She pushed him back, gently but firmly, and he rocked onto his heels.  “You don’t.  You think you want me, but you don’t.”

Indignation flared in him.  “You don’t know anything about what I want.”

For years, he hadn’t wanted anyone.  His libido was a self-contained, physical need, which was usually independent from attraction to other people; the sex he’d had at uni had mostly been about satisfying his prurient curiosity.  He’d tired of it after he’d discovered sex was, for the most part, torrid, messy, feckless, predictable, and ultimately unsatisfying.  It had seemed entirely logical to give up sex along with cocaine, since by the end of his short, intense sexual history, he’d never indulged in one without the other.  He’d never regretted his decision; sex on it’s own held little temptation, and he’d never returned to it, even on danger nights.  He provided his transport with with sexual release as he fed and rested it—sporadically and begrudgingly.

Then he’d met The Woman.

_The Woman who beat you._

It was the first time he’d encountered a person who was both intellectually captivating and physically alluring.

_We both know that’s not quite true._

He took a breath and held it until his nostrils flared and his salivary glands were on overdrive, let it out slowly while wiggling and counting his fingers and toes.  The carpet underneath his knees had been vacumed today, but the maid had missed the spot near the corner of the bed.  She’d been preoccupied by something she’d found on the floor—by the color of the small stain, most likely a strawberry.  Why did people eat in bed?  There was nothing about it which was remotely sexy.

“You see what I mean?”  Irene frowned at him, not without tenderness.

“It has been nine hundred and seventeen days since... everything,” he said.  

“Sherlock, these things take more than time.”

“I can’t touch my own body.  It’s—”

He thought of Jim’s fingers inside his waistband, zipping down his flies, pulling Sherlock’s penis from his pants with the same flourish with which he’d brandished his knives, turning him into a weapon which he could use to harm Molly.

She placed a hand against his chest.  “Do you want me to talk you through it?  I would do that for you.”

“No.  I—”

He’d been hard and aching beneath Jim’s hand, hadn’t needed his fingers twisting his foreskin over his glans to raise his arousal.

“I don’t trust myself.”  

He couldn’t permit his mind to wander to the savage courage in Molly’s face when he’d been on his knees between her thighs, the determined way in which she’d wrapped her legs around him when he’d entered her, the secret, reassuring squeezes of her internal muscles.

He’d staunchly ignored his libido since, and as a result, his sly, treacherous transport sought release when he was unconscious, leaving him to wake with his thighs stuck to each other and his linens like he was a teenager.  Had he set out to classically condition himself to release only during the dreams in which he violated Molly, or Jim violated him, or both together, he could not have achieved a more perfect result.  Jim would have been pleased.

“Sherlock, physical arousal doesn’t equate consent, or even desire.”

He stood, suddenly unable to be on his knees.  “I was raped, Irene, not lobotomized.  I understand the difference.  It doesn’t make the prospect of masturbating to my assault less loathsome.”

She ignored his jibe, yet again, and looked up at him, jaw forward.  “And what makes you think partnered sex would be any better than masturbation?”

He let a smile quirk over his lips. “You’re considerably more attractive than I am.”

“Bollocks.”

“So you think _I’m_ more attractive?”

“Stop deflecting.”

He sighed.  “I did want you, you know.  In Peshawar.”  

She looked down at the bedspread and touched it with her palm, tracing the lines of embroidery with a red nail.  “I was never sure.”

“I didn’t want you to be.”

She looked back up at him, blue eyes troubled.  “I’m not sure, now.”

“I am.”

“Look at us both,” she said, with a sad smile.  Defensively, she crossed the fabric of the robe she’d laid out for Sherlock over her own body and knotted the sash around her narrow waist.  “You can stay the night.  You don’t need a sexual pretext if you want company.”

He stared at her.  “Irene, I’m not one of your infantilist clients looking for someone to mother me.”

“No, but you’re lonely.  And you’re conflating intimacy with sex.”  She held his gaze, unblinking.  A less astute practitioner of body language might have looked upward and left.  There was something _too_ transparent about her gaze, too wide open.  He knew all about using nakedness as armour.

“And there’s your self-portrait, Irene.  Or I should say, ‘Miss Adler.’”

She folded her arms over her chest.  “This isn’t about me.”

“Oh, but it is,” he was pacing now, making slow circles.  “You’re concerned that I’m ‘conflating’ sex and intimacy.  Sex _is_ intimacy, Irene.  And you,” he glanced back at her,  “don’t do intimacy well.  That’s why you don’t have sex with clients,” he narrowed his eyes, “anymore.”

Her eyes glinted, steel showing through the blue, cheap sapphires heat treated until azure on the surface but colorless beneath.  “Glass houses.”  Irene smiled as she spoke, showing her teeth. “Stones.”

“What happened to having me on a desk until I begged for mercy, twice?”

She smirked.  “How do you suppose I usually _have_ men, Mr Holmes?”

His eyes widened, fractionally, and he cursed the capillaries in his neck and ears.  “I—”

“I warned you.  You think you want me, but you don’t.”

“And you want to have me, but think you can’t.”

“It seems we’re at an impasse.”

He frowned.  “I thought you of all people would see the solution.”

She tilted her head at him.

“Your,” he waived his fingers, “innuendo.”

She arched her eyebrows.

“It’s more specific than general intimacy issues.  You don’t want to be penetrated.”  

Irene shrugged.  “It’s a preference, Sherlock.  Not a complex.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.  Lesbian sex workers who catered to men weren’t unheard of; he supposed it had something to do with divorcing the sex act from sentiment.  And Irene hadn’t always been a pro domme with her choice of clientele, or had an RP accent, and wasn’t particularly keen on anyone knowing either of those facts.  So far, so transparent.  And yet, she took clear, fierce joy in her work; it wasn’t about the money or the power or even the protection, not really.  She clearly craved the particular kind of connection her vocation provided.  But she needed distance from it, too.  Her aloofness wasn’t just a projection of her dominatrix persona.

Now seemed an inopportune moment to mention any of these things.  “It’s… fine.  I have no interest in penetrating you with any part of my body.  Or in performing cunnilingus.”

“Not all women, even all lesbians, are interested in that, you know.”

He nodded curtly.  “This goes for me as well.  I don’t want to be penetrated with any body part or implement.  Or to receive fellatio.”

A slow smile crept over her lips.  “I can say lesbians aren’t interested in _that_ with considerably more confidence.”

He felt a chuckle start low and deep in his belly, then rumble and spill over.

Irene’s smile broadened.  She stepped forward, hesitant, and touched her fingers to his cheek.

He stopped laughing, breath catching in his throat, and gingerly placed his hands on her shoulders.  “May I—”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed him.

He tasted unicum and lipstick.  She wore one of the long wearing types that wouldn’t rub off; she’d expected to end up kissing him.  Her kiss was measured, careful, just the tip of her tongue in his mouth, swirling against his slowly.  He loosened the sash at her waist and opened her robe, sliding a hand inside and resting it at the small of her back, above the high waist of her suspender belt.  Cradling her head with his other hand, he traced a small whorl where her hair changed direction at the nape of her neck with his thumb.  She sank back to her heels, a soft moan escaping her lips, and he followed her, tilting down to ease his mouth over hers.

She pulled back, cheeks flushed, lids heavy.  “That was—”

“Too intimate?” he asked, voice as even and nonchalant as he was able.

“No.  I mean, yes, it’s intimate.  It’s not too intimate.  I just,” she brushed a lock behind her ear.  “It’s been a while since I kissed a man.”

“The height disparity makes you feel vulnerable.”

She chuckled.  “Am I so transparent?”

“Yes,” he said.  He added a smile, afterwards, to soften it.  “You prefer to be in control of a sexual encounter.  I’m not sure how much control I can relinquish.”  He sat on the bed, holding his hand out towards her.  “Better?”

She took his fingertips into hers, tracing them, then brought them to her lips slowly.  She laid a line of kisses over his palm and pulse point, darting the tip of her tongue along his vein.

He shivered.

Her eyes flipped up to him, questioningly.

“It’s fine,” he said.  “Good.”

She stood in front of him, head tilted to the side, taking him in.  “So… no oral sex.  No penetration.  Can I touch your cock?”

He bit his lip, trying not to think of Jim’s fingers tugging at his foreskin.  “Would you like to?”

“Only if you want me to.  I’m rather skilled at it, but the pleasure I derive is from the responses I can elicit.  Male genitals, in and of themselves, hold little appeal for me.”

“Manual stimulation has never been a favorite of mine.”

“That settles that, then.”

“I might… like you to.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I think it might be… beneficial to have someone’s hand on me that’s not my own or…  That is, if you want to.”

“Let’s not start with that.  If you decide you want it later, you can ask me.”

“Twice?” he asked, a smirk on his features.

She smiled.  “Once will do.”  Irene placed her hands on his shoulders, tilted her head appraisingly, and widened her stance.  “Can I—” she lifted her knee and set her stockinged foot on the bed, her robe falling the rest of the way open and giving him a view of her thigh.

His breath was tight, and he forced himself to let it out slowly, mindful of the way his pulse was starting to rise and pound in his ears.  “I think so.”

She slid into his lap, straddling him, sitting on top of his thighs, and wrapped her arms behind his head.  “Are you sure?”

He kissed her, slowly at first and then with more fervor.  His pulse continued to jackhammer in his ears.  He hoped she would mistake his rising panic for desire.

Irene continued to curl her tongue around his, stroking the nape of his neck, scratching lightly along his scalp with her nails.  He tried to focus on her hand instead of the weight of her body on top of his.  His scalp was sensitive, and her gentle tugs of his hair and teasing circles of her fingertips were not unpleasant.  He mirrored her gestures and was rewarded with a small moan into his mouth.

She broke the kiss; her lipstick had finally begun to smear, and he felt a small jolt of pride at being able to undo her.  Just a bit.  He had been good at this, once.

“You don’t like me on top.”

“No,” he admitted.

“Sherlock, you have to talk to me.”

“I’m not going to panic again.”

“Yes, but the point of sex is to enjoy yourself.”

“Is it?” he asked.

“I’ve always thought so.”

He shrugged.  “I want to be close to someone.” Bit Not Good, the non specificity.  “To you.  I don’t expect it will be enjoyable the entire time.”

She gazed at him a long moment, and then, apparently satisfied, conceded, “fair enough.”  She climbed out of his lap, however, taking her weight off of him, and let the robe fall from her shoulders and into a puddle around her feet.  She nudged it away with her toe and stepped around him to the bed, lay back on it and turned her body towards him.

He lay down and rolled towards her, pulling himself along until they were facing each other, laying horizontally across the king size bed.

She kissed him once, nearly chastely, and slid her hand down the length of his flank, coming to a stop on top of his hip.  “Better?” she asked.

He brought her face to his so their noses touched, and held her, letting the warmth of her body flow into his.  “Better,” he whispered.

For four minutes and twenty eight seconds, (keeping track of the time lapsing tamped his anxiety down) they lay on the bed forehead to forehead, arms on one another’s shoulders.  Then he began to to taste her lips again, delicately probing his tongue between them, sucking them into his mouth, allowing her to do the same with his.  Sherlock had never snogged anyone when he was a teenager, but he supposed this was what teenagers did.  Most of his kisses had been brief, ferocious preludes to him dropping to his knees.

Irene drew back, breathless, and looked into his eyes.  Hers were dark and heavy lidded, and her mascara was smudged.

“You’re crying.”

“It’s fine,” she said.  “You kiss like a lesbian.”

“I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.”

“It’s a compliment.  You let kissing be a sex act in itself.  You don’t dismiss it as foreplay.”

He blinked.  “Oh.”  He smoothed a tear off of Irene’s lashes.  “You miss kissing—”

She pressed a finger to his lips before he could remember her lover’s name.  “Just you and I here.  No one else.”

He opened his mouth and sucked her finger into it.  No one else.  He wouldn’t think of Jim’s fingers pressing down on his tongue, of the metal gag forcing open his aching jaw, of himself drooling helplessly, humiliatingly, onto the floor as Molly watched.  He pulled his lips back off of Irene’s finger and kissed the tip.  He tried again, licking her finger, focusing on the things that made it distinctly hers—the length of her nails, the petiteness of her hands.  He sucked a second one into his mouth, and her breath caught.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded, tracing her wrist with the ball of his thumb.  Her body arched forward, hips meeting his.  Heat spread downward from his navel into his clenched abductor muscles and calves, upward into his cock, which was beginning to wake, slowly rousing to the heat of her body.  A smile crept from her lips up into her eyes, and she sensuously stroked his tongue.  He groaned, and Irene pressed her pelvis tighter to his until the whole lower halves of their bodies were touching, hooked her leg behind his to trace the taut line of his calf with her stockinged foot.  He curled his toes, fighting the instinct to rut, and insinuated a leg between her parted thighs.  She hissed and grasped his arse firmly with her hand, caressing the length of his thigh and tilting her body deeper into his.  He mirrored her, letting his fingertips taste the textures between her hip and knee—the downy hairs on her upper thigh, the crisp lace and slinky nylon of her stockings.

His cock was straining against the front of his trousers now, throbbing and leaking beneath layers of cotton and wool.  He wanted desperately to flip her onto her back, to spread her legs with his—but settled for snaking his arms behind her hips and pulling her closer.  The bra she wore was unlined.  He felt the hardness of her nipples through his shirt, which was damp with perspiration, but he didn’t want to separate long enough to take it off, and he wasn’t sure he needed or wanted to be naked.  Irene appeared to feel the same, grinding against his thigh, chasing the friction of his wool trousers through her black lace lingerie.  He became caught up in her desire, found himself unconsciously mimicking her increasingly urgent movements.  Both of them were gasping now, his attempts to suck Irene’s fingers forgotten as they panted and writhed together, legs intertwined.

Irene’s cry was completely unlike the sound she’d recorded and set as his text alert—choked, wild, nearly a wail.  She clenched her eyes shut and twisted her fingers in the back of his shirt, thighs tightening like a vice around his leg, undulating shamelessly against him.  He held her through it, smoothing her damp hair out of her eyes, and kissed the top of her head.  She shuddered against him, and then lay still except for a faint tremble in her legs.  He counted the nubs of her vertebrae with his fingertips, caressed along her sides.  

“That was lovely,” he told her.  And it had been.  For those brief moments, he hadn’t thought of anyone but her.

She carefully disentangled her legs from his and lay parallel with him again, eyes on his.  A pink flush covered her from collarbones to cheeks.

Absently, he traced a line along her clavicle to the notch at the base of her throat.

She shivered.  “Can I touch you, love?”

He felt content, actually.  Would have preferred to lie still with her, to listen to her breathing.  But that wasn’t the point of this exercise.  He nodded.

She brushed her fingers down the side of his face, along the line of his jaw and neck, into the vee of his shirt.  She made no movement towards his buttons, adhering to their unspoken agreement to leave their clothes on, instead stroking his chest through the fabric of his shirt.  She paused at the button of his trousers, waiting.

“Let me,” he said, moving her hand away.  His fingers were fumbling, clumsy.  He could feel Irene’s eyes on him as he loosed the button, and blood filled his face.  She smiled a smile he suspected was reserved for nervous clients.  It failed to reassure; he’d gone completely flaccid in the minutes since her orgasm.

Pointedly ignoring his erection, or lack thereof, Irene resumed kissing him, delicately tasting his lips and ears and jawline.  When the tip of her tongue fluttered over his closed eyelids, a line of pleasure shot through his brain via his optic nerve, down the length of his spine and into his groin.  He groaned, and she held his face still and continued tracing small circles as he writhed against the sheets.

He unzipped his flies, intending only to adjust himself against his trousers, give his aching cock some room.

“Go on, then,” Irene urged, breaking off kissing to watch him.

He opened his eyes, staring down at the tent in his cotton pants, at the dark spot of fluid on the front of them.  His pulse was like a timpani in his ears.  This should be a simple thing.  He removed his cock from his trousers multiple times a day to relieve himself, frequently in public loos around other people.

“Use my hand,” she suggested, placing it on his belly.

His abdominal muscles clenched involuntarily.

She drew it back, and he caught her wrist, careful not to squeeze but firmly enough to make it clear he wanted her to stay.  She relaxed her fingers as he placed his palm over the back of her hand and intertwined them with hers, then slowly worked them underneath his waistband.  His breath was coming out in great, gulping gasps.

“That’s good,” she whispered.  “Slow down, keep breathing.  Look at me.”

He did.

She kissed his forehead.  “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know,” he closed his eyes again.  “Would you...  do what you were doing before?”

She kissed his eyelid.  “This?”

He nodded.

She made light, sucking motions with her lips, tongue darting gently between them, and he focused on the sensation until his breathing calmed.  His pulse was still elevated, but part of that was desire.  He slowly curled both their fingers around his shaft.

Irene hummed in pleasure, and the vibration transmitted through her lips and made him tremble.  “You’re beautiful like this,” she whispered, moving her lips from his eyelid to his ear.  “You’re doing so well.”

It was completely irrational that her praise should affect him the way it did.  Sherlock had never cared what others thought of him, and he felt nothing but contempt for those who needed validation and reassurance.  But there was something soothing about her voice—and even though he knew that it was calculated, that it was her domme voice, he felt some of the tension leave his neck and shoulders, shift into his legs as he concentrated on chasing his orgasm.

She caressed his hair with her free hand and let him move her other one together with his.  He rolled his foreskin back and forth over his glans, quickly and with minimal pressure; he’d never needed vigorous stimulation.  Irene kissed the side of his cheek and then slid her tongue up under his ear as he thrust upward into their hands.  She purred, delighted, and nipped and sucked at his earlobe.  He tilted his head to give her better access to his neck and jaw, swallowing as her lips and teeth grazed his adam’s apple.  For a split second, he thought of Jim, mouth on his trachea, knife at his throat, and he opened his eyes, peered down his nose into Irene’s curls.  She looked up at him, and brought her lips to his again, a slow, snaking slide of tongues with eyes locked, vision crossed and blurred as they watched each other at an intimate distance.  

Their hands moved in synchrony along his shaft, the pressure building and easing with each tender tug as he rocked up into their interlaced fingers.

He broke the kiss, panting now, and pressed his forehead to hers.

Both of them watched the slow play of skin over slick skin, the purpling, glistening glans uncovered and re-covered with their movement.

“Like that,” she urged, “just like that.”

His bollocks began to rise, drawing close, and his leg muscles tightened, toenails scraping the sheets.  He forced himself to keep his eyes open, to watch her watching him.  Her pupils were blown wide, the way they were when they’d sat together in front of the fireplace, when he’d taken her pulse the first time.

_If it was the end of the world.  If It were the very last night…_

“Yes,” he said.  “Yes, yes.”  His seed spilled over their joined hands, and she kissed him.


	6. Yes, Miss Adler

Sherlock awoke to the sound of water running in the bathroom.  Light streamed through the windows, cracked open to let in the crisp, spring air which licked under the sill and pushed the white curtains inward.  He sat up in the sheets, soft against his skin, and stretched, letting the breeze kiss his shoulders.

Molly emerged from the loo, wearing a white cotton nightdress, barefoot beneath.  Her hair was loose and still mused from sleep.  “Morning,” she said, smiling.

He meant to answer, but she ran the few steps between her and the bed and lept into it before he could speak.  She slid up next to him, an absurd grin on her face, and suddenly, he was determined to kiss it off her.  He lay his lips over hers, and they parted readily, welcoming his tongue into her mouth.  She tasted faintly of toothpaste.  Her tongue slipped over and along his; her hands made their way up his shoulders and behind his neck.  He moved to straddle her, bracing his forearms on either side, but she surprised him by drawing her knee up between his thighs, crooking her leg behind his, and flipping him onto his back.

He laughed as his head struck the pillow, flopping into down.

Molly drew the nightgown over her head, revealing the pink flushed skin of her chest, the shadow between the soft flesh and firmer muscle of her belly, and a truly ridiculous pair of knickers: white cotton patterned with tiny bullfrogs.  They should have been juvenile, but somehow he found them endearing instead.

Sherlock inhaled and placed his hands on her hips, exhaled and slid them over her sides, up along her ribs (she giggled; she was ticklish; that was useful knowledge he could exploit later) and under the swell of her breasts.  They were small and pert and _perfect_ , and how had he ever thought there was anything lacking in them?

Molly cast aside her nightgown in a flourish, and smiled coyly down at him.  He sat up, cupped her buttocks, and pressed his lips to her mons, breathing against her, sucking at the dampening cotton, teasing the edges of her underwear with the tip of his tongue.  She sighed, and he slid his hands up under both sides of the waistband of her knickers, shimmying them down over her hips.  He gently parted the fine, downy hair with his fingers and probed her folds with his tongue.  When he found her clit and pressed against it, licking up and down in long strokes, she arched towards him, fingers twisting in his hair, almost to the point of pain.

He tightened his grip on her buttocks and drew her down until her thighs were tight against his cheeks, sucking her lips into his mouth and tonguing between them.  She whimpered when his teeth grazed her clit, body gyrating in slow circles against him in time with the rhythms of his tongue.  “That’s good,” she murmured, “so good, but it isn’t enough.”

Molly dismounted, slid her body backwards along his torso, and lay atop him.  She pushed her knickers down to her knees and wriggled against him, working them down the length of her legs until she could toe them off and kick them onto the floor.  She spread her legs, then, straddling him.  He felt her wetness warm on his belly, and a small thrill pulsed through him as he realized it was because of him.

She placed quick, teasing kisses along his neck and jaw, avoiding his lips, which constantly searched for hers, opening and closing like a fish gasping out of water.  When she finally locked her mouth on his, he pulled her lower lip between his teeth, determined not to let her go.

He released her hip and moved his hand to his cock, lining them up, teasing her lips with the head.  She was having none of it, and pushed down on him with a moan.  He cried out as he slid into intoxicating, rippled heat.  Molly plunged her tongue into his mouth, licking everywhere she could reach.  Both of them gasped for breath when at last she broke the kiss.

“Hold me,” she demanded, and he put his arms around her, clutching her back, running his hands along it.  “Tighter,” she insisted, and he squeezed, drawing her into a bear hug, and she thrashed, resisting him.  He took the hint, folded her arms behind her back, grasped her wrists, and she let all her weight fall on him, buried her nose in his neck, and whispered something that might have been “please.”

Sherlock drew his knees up, trying to give her something to grind against, and she writhed against him, chasing friction, pressing her mons against his pelvis, and he arched his hips up, meeting her thrust for thrust.  She groaned, squirming in earnest, and he squeezed her body to his, hardly moving now, making her work for it.  She nipped his neck and bucked her hips fiercely, struggling hard, forcing him to fight to keep her pinned.

He was lost in her pleasure, his own body forgotten as she rode him.  Sweat slicked their torsos together.  Her damp, tangled hair fell in a cloud around his head; a tendril caught in his mouth.  Her hair smelled like strawberries, wildflowers, ethanol-- _Molly_.

“Sherlock, I’m going to--”

“Please,” he urged.  “I want to see you.”

Her thighs clamped hard around his, and then the rest of her muscles followed; a strained, shuddering sound verging on a wail escaped her throat.

He felt droplets of wetness streaking his neck; the salt of her tears made his skin itch.

“Shhh…” He released her wrists, rubbed them, ran his hands up and down her back.  “It’s alright.”

“I love you,” she whispered into his clavicle.

“I know.  It’s more than I ever hoped for, better than I deserve, and I--”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“But I do.”

He rolled her over, so that they were facing, lying side by side.  He cupped her face, smoothing the tangled strands, freeing her hair from his mouth.

She smiled, grin taking over her flushed face, bringing light to her reddened eyes.

“I. Love. You.  Molly Hooper.”

She kissed him lightly, almost chastely, an incongruous juxtaposition with her earlier wantonness.  “I said you could have me.”

 

* * *

 

 

He awoke with tears drying on his cheeks, and it was infinitely worse than waking up covered in semen and sweat in Kiev.  He somehow felt more ashamed of this saccharine dream of Molly than any of the darkest nightmares he’d had of her and Jim.  He’d been so certain that it had been real, but it wasn’t.  He wasn’t even sure his _fantasy_ was real, if he genuinely harboured feelings beyond affection and respect for Molly, or if this newly found outpouring of tenderness was just a confused reaction to what they’d endured together.  Not that it mattered.  It was wrong of him to want her in that way, and pathetic of him to dwell on what he couldn’t have.  

He rolled over and caught a whiff of Chopard on the sheets, and a view of Buda Castle overlooking the gray green ribbon of the Danube in the early morning light.  Irene.  Budapest.  Shit.

He heard the sound of running water in the en-suite.  Shower, not sink.  He wondered if he could slip out without disturbing her.

He sat up in bed, feeling the twinge of sore muscles.  He probed a tender spot on his neck with his fingers before standing up.  He’d fallen asleep in his clothes.  They were wrinkled beyond presentability, but he could cover the worst of it with his coat.  He walked to the dresser and collected his things: wallet, passport, keys.  There was a message on his mobile; he was disturbed the text alert hadn’t wakened him.

> Sorry to interrupt your sex holiday, little brother, but you’re needed in Odessa.  

He rolled his eyes.  He’d expected no less, staying this close to the embassy.

> I’d post you some macaroons, but I suppose you’re ‘dieting’ again.

He regretted the message as soon as he’d sent it.  First Irene, then the nostalgia.  Mycroft really would think he was slipping.  He stuffed the phone into his coat pocket.

Irene stepped out of the bathroom, wrapped in a hotel robe. Her hair was mussed from sleep, and she’d gone to bed with her make-up on.  Her mascara had smudged around her eyes.  Somehow she was painfully lovely.

“Sherlock Holmes, if you even think of leaving without saying goodbye, I’ll never see you again.”

Guilt stabbed through him, because he _had_ been trying to leave unseen, because he’d dreamed of Molly in Irene’s bed, because he’d been thinking that this might be, and perhaps should be, their last meeting.  Irene was in love with him.  He couldn’t fathom why, but although sentiment wasn’t Sherlock’s area, even he knew it was poor form to lead someone on if the feeling wasn’t reciprocal.

“I have to go back to Ukraine,” he explained.

She nodded.  “I’d expected as much.  There’s a Hungarian style breakfast in the sitting room.  Salami, cucumber, toast, that kind of thing.  If you’d prefer, I can order something else.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’ll eat anyway.”

A ghost of a smile crept over his lips despite his attempts to suppress it.  “Yes, Miss Adler.”  

She returned his smile, and it was a subtle, silly grin, with none of the smoulder to which he’d become accustomed.  “I was just starting the shower.  You’re welcome to join me.”

“Thank you, no.”

“Suit yourself.”  She stripped off the robe and stepped into the shower, leaving the door open.  Her perfect, creamy skin became a blur behind frosted glass as the bathroom filled with steam.

He felt compelled to walk through the open bathroom door, to slide aside the humidity streaked glass and pull Irene out from under the spray.  He lifted her up so that they were of a height and brought her close for a quick kiss.  “Goodbye.”

She laughed, bringing her forehead to his, pressing their noses together.  “Don’t die on me again,” she whispered, a sudden seriousness in her voice.

He set her down slowly, and kissed her once more, between the eyebrows.  “I’ll do my best.”

She grasped his lapels with wet palms.  “Go to her.”

He tensed.

“Say what you need to say.  Give her the chance to do the same.”

He pursed his lips.  “I am sorry.”

“You’ve nothing to apologize for, Sherlock.”

He knew she meant for more than for this morning, or last night.  He tried hard to believe her.

“Thank you,” he said, leaning into the shower to embrace her.  Water sluiced down his coat and hair; he didn’t care; he’d need to change before he caught the train anyway.

Irene smiled and pushed him away.  “Go.  You’re getting soaked.”

“I will.”

She nodded, clearly having heard it as a promise.

He shook the worst of the water from his coat and hair, and scrubbed his head with a towel before ducking out of the bathroom.  He didn’t look back.

He paused in the sitting room.  There was indeed breakfast laid out on the coffee table.  He snatched a slice of toast with some kind of eggplant based spread, piled a few slices of salami on top and took a bite.  One promise kept.  One yet to keep.  He allowed himself one last glance at the turquoise dome of the palace outside the window before striding out of Irene’s hotel room.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank everyone who waited so patiently for me to finish this story. I had a plan from the beginning, and then stared second guessing it, thinking I should have added Molly or casefic or more of Sherlock's recovery. I wrote lots of additional material my wonderful betas graciously read through. But in the end, I made my way back to the simplest version of the story. I hope the ending suits. Much love to all of you.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the same crack beta team as Anything You Need:
> 
> Pornocalypse Horseman 3littleowls, Alutiv, Prurient_curiosity, and Britpicker Gowerstreet.


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